CCF to show 'Au Revoir les Enfants'

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): A major film by director Louis Malle will be screened at the French Cultural Center next week from Monday Sept. 23 through Sept. 30. True to the approach of a director who has never held back in terms of subject matter -- incest, in Murmur of the Heart, underage prostitution, in Pretty Baby, the nature of wartime collaboration and resistance, in Lacombe, Lucien -- Au Revoir les Enfants is a film free of sensation and full of quiet power.

Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants is semi-autobiographical. It tells of the experience of a young boy sent away from his home in an urban war zone to a rural boarding school that is not quite out of the reach of the Gestapo or out of bombing range.

In today's argot, 12-year-old Julien Quentin (played by Gaspard Manesse) is "cool". He is a touch sophisticated, a point or two better in his grades yet popular among his classmates at the provincial Catholic boarding school. And he can be influential. This has been noted by the teaching fathers and Julien is asked to help with the assimilation of a new arrival, Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejto), quickly dubbed "Easter Bonnet" by the class. Bonnet is set up next to him in the crowded dormitory.

Julien doesn't feel disposed to like this usurper much, who can produce an A-minus grade to nudge him out of top position and who has mastered the piano, classical and jazz. Bonnet even turns the admirable head of the pretty music teacher when he shows his skill. Julien can only stand and watch with envy.

But "the Bonnet" has a secret, and it could be a mortal secret. Julien awakes one night to see him praying, with candles lit and a cap on his head: Bonnet is Jewish. Julien could instantly expose the true Jean Kippelstein but he is somewhat disinclined to do so. Instead, he asks his older brother Francois what it means to be Jewish and why Jews are not liked. Francois, a girl-crazy senior, replies with all the worldly insight of a 17-year-old, that it's because they are "smarter than us and they crucified Jesus Christ". No, says Julien, it was the Romans who did that.

On parent's day, Julien's attractive maman visits and takes her two sons out to lunch to a restaurant in the village. Bonnet, whose parents do not show, accompanies them. A group of German officers are at a table in the room and so too, apparently, is an elderly Jewish customer. So, it is not Jean Bonnet, who will be discovered as we hold our breath in anticipation, but a gentleman of distinguished appearance who has been a customer there for 20 years; but he will not be thrown out to satisfy the collaborators who so rudely interrupt everyone's lunch. A French-speaking German officer ("Oh, he was only trying to impress you, Maman!") stands up and throws the French collaborator out instead.

Just as there seem to be two types of French in this delicately constructed film there seem to be two types of Germans. First, there are the Catholic Bavarian German soldiers who catch Jean and Julien when they are lost after curfew in the woods and return them to the school with a chiding; then there are the Gestapo who ultimately descend on the school.

Au Revoir and the earlier Lacombe, Lucien both reflect on Malle's own experience of growing up in a time of political turmoil, during the German occupation of France in World War II. After certain critics took exception to the earlier Lacombe, Lucien and its representations, Malle left for a home in the U.S., where he made Pretty Baby (1978) and Atlantic City (1981). Was it Malle's celebrated ability to dispassionately represent both sides of a story that chased him out of France?

Some of Malle's key films say goodbye to childhood -- Murmur of the Heart, Lacombe, Lucien and of course Au Revoir les Enfants -- but the director didn't keep hammering away at any one theme during a career which is best described as eclectic. His early work was as a technical assistant with celebrated directors Robert Bresson and underwater filmmaker Jacques Cousteau.

Malle was contiguous with and yet not quite part of the New Wave, but it could be said that he was in spirit with the New Wave if not religiously indulging in its formal experimentation. He may just have found it hard to take sides and plump himself down firmly on one side of the ideological fence. But he had no problem delivering a critique of society, looking for change rather than ground zero like his colleague Jean-Luc Godard whose Prenom Carmen was shown at the CCF this week.

But not for a moment in Au Revoir does the narrative sag under the weight of intellectualizing, formal conceit or anything else. We delight in and directly identify with the two schoolboys, Jean and Julien, when they "wag" the obligatory air-raid shelter when the sirens sound.

Right in the middle of a jazz duet they are not going anywhere and duck down behind the furniture so they can continue. The wail of sirens and explosions are in the background as the boys play on, then adjourn to the deserted school courtyard for a chat under the falling snowflakes, and then head off to the kitchen to make themselves something really delicious while there's no one around.

Almost no one, because who should show up but Joseph, just sacked from his job when they discovered him selling the boys' supplies on the black market -- pate and jam from home for cigarettes. Poor Joseph with the gammy leg is the only one with an apparent reason to betray the school, its secret charges and its staff with their leanings towards the Resistance.

Schoolmaster Father Jean and three Jewish boys being hidden in his school are bundled off by the German Gestapo one chilly January morning." Au revoir, mes enfants. A bientot." (Goodbye my children. See you soon.) calls Father Jean -- brave words from someone being shown the door in this instance. The camera lingers a moment on the spot where the departing figures were, on the walls that seem to have closed over them.

Left behind are the survivors. Several rows of schoolboys left standing in the cold of a midwinter, transfixed by a scene that they are witness to and at the same time part of. The outside world of wartime Europe has found entry into the space around them and in one fell swoop of a moment confronted youth with the harsh complexity of the adult world.

Au Revoir les Enfants is a very moving film with excellent youthful performances, delicately poised in its propositions and elegantly photographed. Coincidentally, it complements the short season of thoughtful films on the "familiar and the foreign" at the Goethe Institute this weekend.

* Au Revoir les Enfants will be screened at the French Cultural Center on Sept. 23, Sept. 26, Sept. 28 and Sept. 30 at 3.30 p.m and Sept. 24 and Sept. 27 at 7.30 p.m.