au-revoir-les-enfants

http://www.criterion.com/films/549-au-revoir-les-enfants

SYNOPSIS: Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Julien
Gaspard Manesse
Bonnet
Raphaël Fejitö
Madame Quentin
Francine Racette
François Quentin
Stanislas Carré de Malberg
Père Jean
Philippe Morier-Genoud
Père Michel
François Berléand
Joseph
François Négret
Muller
Peter Fitz
Credits
Director
Louis Malle
Screenplay
Louis Malle
Director of photography
Renato Berta
Editor
Emmanuelle Castro
Assistant editor
Marie-France Poulizac
Assistant director
Yann Gilbert
Production manager
Gérald Molto
Unit production manager
Jean-Yves Asselin
Casting
Jeanne Biras and Iris Carrière
Continuity
France La Chapelle
Costumes
Corrine Jorry
Hair and makeup
Susan Robertson
Sound
Jean-Claude Laureux
Sound mixer
Claude Villand
Foley artist
Daniel Couteau
Production design
Willy Holt
Production consultant
Christian Ferry
Disc Features
Restored digital transfer supervised by director of photography Renato Berta (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
Video interviews with Louis Malle biographer Pierre Billard and actress Candice Bergen, Malle’s widow
Joseph: A Character Study, a profile of the provocative figure from Au revoir les enfants, created by filmmaker Guy Magen in 2005
The Immigrant, Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 short comedy, featured in the film
Audio excerpts from a 1988 AFI interview with Malle
Original theatrical trailer and teaser
PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by film critic Philip Kemp and historian Francis J. Murphy
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Au revoir les enfants: Childhood’s End
By Philip KempMarch 27, 2006
“Do you realize,” muses the twelve-year-old Julien Quentin, rapt in the solipsism of early adolescence, “that there’ll never be another January 17, 1944 Read more »
Au revoir les enfants: Père Jacques and the Petit-Collège d’Avon
By Francis J. MurphyMarch 27, 2006
The site of Louis Malle’s film Au revoir les enfants was the Petit-Collège d’Avon, a residential prep school located on the grounds Read more »
Other Editions

DVD
1 Disc
SRP: $29.95
Criterion Store price:$23.96Add to CartAdd to Wishlist
Also in these box sets

3 Films by Louis MalleSee product info »
Related FilmsForbidden GamesRené Clément God’s CountryLouis Malle Lacombe, LucienLouis Malle
ExploreLouis Malle Growing Pains Xavier Dolan’s Top 10

“Do you realize,” muses the twelve-year-old Julien Quentin, rapt in the solipsism of early adolescence, “that there’ll never be another January 17, 1944? Never again? . . . I’m the only one in this school who thinks about death. It’s incredible.” As the date implies, he could hardly be more wrong. Many of those around him are thinking about death, and in far less theoretical terms.
The moment of adolescent crisis, the point at which the adult world, in all its messy ambiguity, drives in upon and disrupts childhood certitudes, always fascinated Louis Malle. From 1960’s Zazie dans le métro (whose eponymous heroine turns the tables with some disruption of her own) through Murmur of the Heart (1972); Lacombe, Lucien (1974); Black Moon (1975); and Pretty Baby (1978), his young protagonists find themselves confronted with a world that operates according to no rules they’ve been led to expect. With Au revoir les enfants (1987), Malle homed in on the autobiographical reference point of this theme, the moment that “may well have determined my vocation as a filmmaker,” when, age eleven, he watched a Gestapo official enter the classroom of his Fontainebleau school and summon a fellow pupil by an unfamiliar, Jewish name. The film, a “reinvention of the past,” traces the wary, prickly friendship between Julien (Gaspard Manesse), Malle’s surrogate, and a Jewish boy, Jean Bonnet (played by Raphaël Fejtö, with the raw, wounded stare of the young Kafka).
Malle brought us here, or hereabouts, earlier in his career. The betrayal of Bonnet comes through the resentment of a “Lacombe, Lucien” in the making—a crippled scullery lad, mocked, abused, and eventually dismissed for the black marketeering in which several pupils, Julien among them, have actively colluded. This Joseph, returning in the Gestapo’s wake, swaggers uneasily in his flashy new suit, confronting Julien’s gaze of appalled realization. “Stop acting so pious! There’s a war going on, kid,” he blusters, while Julien registers his own inescapably shared guilt.
Earlier, the film skirts the lusher incestuous territory of Murmur of the Heart, in the relationship between Julien and his mother—once again passionate, sexually charged, but also (unlike in the earlier film) exposed as faintly ludicrous in its hothouse romanticism. Already in the opening separation scene, set (where else?) in a railway station, Malle slyly subverts the tone, as the pair luxuriate in melodramatic cliché, with Julien’s Byronic angst (“I don’t give a damn about Dad, and I hate you”) capped by his mother’s Fidelio: “You think I like this? I’d like to dress up as a boy and come with you.” The image this evokes, of the shapely Mme Quentin squeezing her hips into schoolboy shorts, at once erotic and ridiculous, self-­indulgently unreal, sets up one side of the ironic counterpoint that underpins the movie. On the one hand, we have Julien’s smugly moneyed background, where politics are sampled à la mode. (“Is he still for Pétain? No one is anymore,” protests Mme Quentin, with the pique of one accused of favoring last season’s hemline.) Against this stands the stark actuality of the terror endured by Bon­net, for whom no luxury of choice exists—parents vanished or arrested, probably dead, and every passing German soldier a source of anguish.
The film’s moral center resides—unexpectedly enough for the director of Viva Maria! (1965), though it’s worth recalling that Malle was once Robert Bresson’s assistant—in a priest, the school’s director, Père Jean (Philippe Morier-Genoud, conveying fierce compassion beneath an aspect of bony austerity). His are the two crucial decisions: first, to harbor Bonnet and two other Jewish boys under false names; and second, to sack Joseph while not expelling, out of consideration for their parents, his accomplices among the pupils—a discrimination whose inequity causes him evident pain, and leads to tragedy. A figure of awkward integrity, he preaches to the assembled affluent parents a diatribe against the callousness of the rich, and laconically dis­misses Julien’s professed interest in the priesthood: “I don’t think you have any calling for the priesthood. It’s a sorry job, anyway.”
Two vividly contrasted scenes—one dark, one light—evoke the murky moral crosscurrents of the period. A game of treasure hunt leaves Julien and Bonnet lost together in the forest, with night falling and gaunt rocks looming like primeval wood spirits. “Are there wolves in these woods?” inquires Bonnet nervously. But here in the twilight, the dangers are illusory. All that appears is a solitary wild boar, trotting hastily off into the bushes. Even the German soldiers whom they encounter, menacingly silhouetted in steel helmets, prove a lot less than monstrous, wrapping the boys solicitously in a blanket and wistfully trying to establish common ground (“We Bavarians are Catholics”).
A few days later, in the genteel ambience of a restaurant, where Mme Quentin has taken Julien, his elder brother, François, and Bonnet to lunch, the real monsters manifest themselves. A group of French fascist militiamen, dangerous buffoons in fat, floppy berets, arrive to harass a dignified old Jew, demanding his instant ejection. Commotion, pro and con, among the clientele; one plump, overdressed woman shouts, “Send the Jews to Moscow!” The contretemps ends when a Wehrmacht officer, under whose admiring glances Mme Quentin has been preening, objects to having his lunch disturbed and drives the militia ignominiously from the room. “He was showing off for you,” François observes to his mother. “Are we Jewish?” Julien inquires ingenuously. “If they heard you!” she exclaims; then, catching herself: “Mind you, I have nothing against Jews. Except for that Léon Blum. They can hang him.”
This incident is doubly refracted to us: through Bonnet’s apprehensive gaze and also through Julien’s intrigued scrutiny both of the events and of his friend’s reactions, as it gradually impinges on him what it means to be another person, and a Jewish person at that. In Malle’s sympathetic portrayal, Julien rings wholly true as a creature poised on the brink of adulthood, agitated by contrary impulses—touchy, curious, veering unpredictably from cruelty to kindness, savoring the erotic passages in The Arabian Nights yet still prone to bed-wetting. Gaspard Manesse (a nonprofessional, like all the younger cast members) inhabits his role with total conviction. Around him, Malle skillfully re-creates the rhythms and petty details of boarding school life of the period: the unappetizing food, the welcome break of an air raid, stilt battles on the playground, the history teacher (a World War I veteran) marking Allied advances with flags on a map. And a film show, of Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, rapturously received by staff and pupils alike. One sequence of it acquires unwonted poignancy: as the steerage passengers, stock ghetto types in beards and head scarves, are roped off on deck like cattle, misgivings temper the laughter on a few watching faces.
Just occasionally, the film verges on stereotype; as in Lacombe, Lucien, Jewishness automatically equals cultural superiority. Bonnet must excel not only academically but also musically, delighting the pretty young piano teacher with his sensitive Schubert. This can be forgiven, though, for the moment of joyous complicity when, alone with Julien during an air raid, while everyone else has retreated to the shelter, he leads his friend in an exuberant burst of four-handed boogie-woogie.
Given such moments, Au revoir les enfants—for all its tragic subject matter and its elegiac finale—is anything but depressing. In the last scene, as the three Jewish boys and Père Jean are led away to their deaths, Bonnet glances back, and Julien (or, rather, the young Louis Malle) raises his hand in timid salute. In that small, affirmative gesture can be read a promise, which this film, with its emotional commitment, its richness of incidental detail, and the warmth and lucidity of its regard, forty years later duly fulfilled.
Philip Kemp is a freelance writer and film historian, and a regular contributor to Sight & Sound, Total Film, and The International Film Guide. This essay was adapted from a review that appeared in the autumn 1988 issue of Sight & Sound.

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1781-au-revoir-les-enfants-pere-jacques-and-the-petit-college-davon

PETIT COLLEGE D'AVON PERE JACQUES Père Jacques, legally named Lucien Bunel

THE BIOGRAPHY OF Père Jacques, legally named Lucien Bunel

The site of Louis Malle’s film Au revoir les enfants was the Petit-Collège d’Avon, a residential prep school located on the grounds of the Carmelite monastery abutting the park of the fabled French palace of Fontainebleau. Malle attended this school during World War II and was deeply influenced both by its founder and headmaster, Père Jacques, and by the events of those days, which, forty years later, he poignantly explored on film.
Those events took place in Nazi-occupied France. By the fall of 1940, one year after the German invasion of Poland, the Nazis dominated almost all of continental Europe, includ­ing France, which had been overwhelmingly defeated by Hitler’s forces. Everywhere in occupied Europe, Jews were subject, sooner or later, to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis and eventually targeted for extermination. As the Nazi vise tightened in France, two key trends emerged: many Jews sought to escape detection by hiding or fleeing, and, gradually, a small network of Christian rescuers grew and came to the aid of the persecuted Jews.
In France, geography aided those Jews seeking to hide, since there were countless small villages and scattered farms, especially in the southern half of the country. For those in flight, France provided potential, but often perilous, routes to Spain and Switzerland, officially neutral neighboring countries, where the dream of safety still survived. The Christian rescuers in France worked clandestinely to provide hiding places, forged documents, escape routes, and, above all, hope to the persecuted Jews. Those Christian rescuers contributed to the fact that 75 percent of French Jews survived the war, a far higher proportion than in Belgium or the Netherlands. Still, of the 300,000 Jews in France, 75,000 perished.
In Au revoir les enfants, Malle was not aiming to produce a documentary film about the Holocaust in France. Rather, he was striving to evoke his experience during the darkest days of the Nazi occupation, especially the day on which his Jewish schoolmates and Père Jacques were arrested and taken away, never to return.
Père Jacques, legally named Lucien Bunel, was the third of seven children in a close, devoutly Catholic, working-class family. He was born in 1900, in Barentin, a Norman mill town in the Seine Valley, near Rouen. From his boyhood years, Bunel developed four enduring characteristics: a deep religious faith, a tireless work ethic, an active love of learning, and a staunch sense of social justice. In 1912, he left home to enter the seminary in Rouen, and for the next thirteen years, until his ordination to the priesthood, he devoted himself to his studies and contemplative prayer. He excelled in French literature and foreign languages. Socially, he emerged as a youth leader of exceptional merit, particularly as director of the summer programs for the needy youngsters of his home parish. During these years, the impact of distant events first directly impinged on him. His brother André was killed in World War I. His own two years of compulsory military service brusquely introduced him to the harsher realities of modern life.
Because of his outstanding performance in the seminary, Bunel was eventually selected to serve, first as a proctor and subsequently as a teacher of religion and English, at St. Joseph’s Institute, a distinguished Cath­olic prep school for boys in Le Havre. Very quickly, the young Father Bunel won the admiration of his colleagues and students for his total dedication and innovative teaching methods, taking an interest in each pupil’s personal progress and unpretentiously practicing the moral ideals he preached in the chapel and explored in the classroom. Still, Father Bunel longed for a stricter, more contemplative life. This quest led him, in 1931, to enter the Carmelite monastery in Lille. The Carmelites had a long, rich tradition of spirituality, but they were not a teaching order. Not long after Father Bunel entered, however, the Carmelite leadership determined that the future of their order required the establishment of a premier Catholic preparatory school for boys, some of whom would potentially join the order in the years ahead.
Père Jacques, as Father Bunel was now called, was, of course, superbly suited to undertake the establishment of such a school. He was enthusiastically selected for the position of founding headmaster. He toiled tirelessly to make the school first a reality and then a model of educational excellence. The Petit-Collège d’Avon first opened its doors for the fall term of 1934 and quickly became one of the most highly regarded Catholic schools in France. Its student body included sons of several of the most prominent Catholic families in France, boys like Louis Malle and his brother.
From its planning to its staffing, every dimension of the organization and operation of the school reflected the guiding spirit of Père Jacques. The idyllic early days of the school ended, however, in September 1938. For Père Jacques, the Czech crisis meant a call-up to military service, and the Munich Accords, far from guaranteeing peace, represented the betrayal by France of its faithful friend Czechoslovakia. He prophetically asked at the time: “How many French citizens no longer appreciate that death is preferable to dishonor?”
With the outbreak of World War II, in September 1939, Père Jacques was called up once again for military service. With the fall of France, in June 1940, he became a German prisoner of war, after his entire artillery battery was captured near Lunéville, in eastern France. Eventually, he was released and returned to Avon, in time to prepare for the delayed reopening of the Petit-Collège, in January 1941. France was now markedly different. The country was not only defeated militarily but also demoralized and divided. The Germans occupied the northern half of the country (including Paris and Avon). A nominally autonomous, but increasingly collaborationist, French regime ruled in the southern half, often called the Free Zone, or simply Vichy.
Gradually, the essential depravity of the Nazi and Vichy authorities was revealed. For conscientious Christians like Père Jacques, the government’s anti-Semitic policies were particularly repugnant. Père Jacques considered Jews theologically to be God’s chosen people and humanly to be his brothers and sisters. He was outraged when he saw his friend Lucien Weil, a distinguished botanist and fellow member of the local Resistance network, wearing the yellow star, as all Jews were required to do. After Professor Weil was deprived of his teaching post at the Lycée Carnot, in Fontainebleau, Père Jacques welcomed him to teach science at the Petit-Collège when school reopened in the fall of 1942.
By this time, there had emerged in France a small but crucially important spiritual resistance movement called Christian Witness (Témoignage chrétien). Through its underground publications, that movement awakened the consciences of countless Christians to the fundamental immorality of Nazism and to the urgency of helping persecuted Jews. In the spirit of this movement, Père Jacques was contacted and implored to shelter three Jewish boys who were in grave danger of deportation and death.
Au revoir les enfants re-creates the experiences of those three Jewish students at the Petit-Collège d’Avon. The film concludes with the arrest of the boys and Père Jacques. The three Jewish students were deported directly to Auschwitz, where they were executed upon arrival, along with their science teacher, Professor Weil—who had been deported on the same train—and his family.
Père Jacques was eventually condemned to the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria. Within the camp, he quickly won the respect and admiration of his fellow prisoners, even the Communists. More than anything else, his selfless care for the sick and the dying, to whom he routinely gave half of his meager ration of food, touched his fellow French-speaking prisoners. They unanimously chose Père Jacques to represent them in their interactions with the liberating forces and the home countries of those who survived when their release finally approached, in May 1945.
By then, Père Jacques weighed only seventy-five pounds and showed undeniable signs of terminal pneumonia. Still, he refused special transport back to France and pledged to remain until the last French prisoner was repatriated. Four weeks later, he died in Linz, Austria. His remains were returned to France, where he was buried in the monastery garden of the Petit-Collège, on June 26, 1945. At his burial, Rabbi Jacob Kaplan, the future Grand Rabbi of France, eulogized Père Jacques with these words: “Thus we have seen cruelty pushed to its extreme horror and benevolence carried to its highest degree of nobility and beauty.” Francis J. Murphy, a specialist in the history of modern France, taught at Boston College for more than thirty years. Among his many publications are several articles and two books concerning Père Jacques, including a biography, Père Jacques: Resplendent in Victory. He died in 2006.