Au Revoir les Enfants

I have been going through my World War II-era films and have noticed a key difference between the movies made in America and those made in Europe. American war movies are about sacrifice and victory, men taking a hill (literal and/or figurative) at great cost but for the good of mankind itself. These films take a small part of the war – a battle, a battalion, a beach – and turn it into a symbol for the greatness that America found through the hecatomb of its best people. Conversely, European war films establish big themes – resistance and compliance, innocence and guilt – by distilling them into a handful of characters that struggle to survive the war. Their lives are not heroic in the conventional sense; rather, they accomplish feats of heroism in between the overriding realities of their survival.

The children of Au Revoir les Enfants are remarkable in their candor and in their desire to be understood. They accept the realities of the war, but don’t feel the need to comply at all times with the policies of their Nazi occupiers. There are more important subjects at hand, like trading for cigarettes and reading the dirty parts of Arabian Nights by flashlight long after curfew has fallen. The main characters, and indeed the supporting characters around them, are on the cusp of adulthood, a time of uncertainty made all the more intransigent by the Occupation.

Louis Malle based Au Revoir les Enfants on an incident from his childhood and one can sense the gloss of memory hanging over the film. What makes his film different than others of its kind, however, is that telling the story as it happened doesn’t satisfy Malle: he wants the audience to grow with the characters and to empathize with the fear that all children feel and try so desperately to hide. This fear is represented by Bonnet, a Jewish student hiding in plain sight under an assumed name. What the audience dreads throughout the film – the threat of Bonnet being discovered by the Gestapo – is the type of fear that hangs over the children everyday of their young lives.

In growing up over the course of the film, the children come to realize that evil does not operate in the darkened corners of cavernous and mysterious rooms, but in the bright light of day. Becoming an adult is a transition marked by the difference between the powerlessness of our youth and the power of learning to resist any malicious forces that position themselves against us. Malle resists by ensuring that the memory of his friend will never by forgotten and thereby atones for his inability to change the course of events in his youth.