Volume 35, Number 8 · May 12, 1988
Neither Hope nor Glory
By Stanley Hoffmann
Au Revoir Les Enfants
a film directed by Louis Malle, screenplay by Louis Malle
Many film directors have used memories from their past in films that were nevertheless mainly works of fiction: Bergman in Fanny and Alexander, Chaplin in several of his masterpieces. In Au revoir les enfants, however, Louis Malle has made a movie out of one experience he hasn't been able either to get out of his mind or to put on the screen for more than forty years. It is the discovery of evil by a sheltered boy of eleven, in early 1944, in France, during the last months of the German occupation. The young Julien Quentin, who represents the young Louis Malle, attends a Catholic boarding school near Paris. There he discovers that an intelligent new boy in his class is a Jew who is being hidden under the name Jean Bonnet by the priests who run the school. The two boys become friends, but soon the Gestapo, tipped off by a disgruntled employee in the school's kitchen, arrests the Jewish boy and the headmaster and takes them off to die in concentration camps.
Review, 3974 words
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