This is the story of a filmmaker who was successful in France, moved to the United States and made some fine films (”Pretty Baby,” ”Atlantic City,” ”My Dinner with Andre”), and now has revisited his homeland to make his most personal film to date-a film that he hopes to be remembered for.
”Au Revoir Les Enfants” (”Goodbye, Children”) is a quietly stunning film that ensures director Louis Malle will get his wish and also reminds us of that old saw that we each have one great story to tell.
”He has wanted to tell this story for a long time,” said Candace Bergen, Malle`s wife of eight years, speaking from their New York apartment.
”He told me the story around the time we were getting married, and I`ve been encouraging him to tell it on film ever since.
”It`s the most important story he has to tell. He wanted to get it just right, and I think what kept him so long from telling it is that he was afraid he might not. He read parts of the script to me and his daughter as he was writing. Now that I`ve seen the film, I think the result is very close to what he first told me. As Isaac Stern said at the New York opening, `There isn`t a false note.` It made me cry when I saw it.”
Malle, 55, speaking from his Manhattan production office, quickly confirmed the deeply personal bedrock of the movie.
”I`ve known for a long time that this is the film I should make. I wrote the first draft of the screenplay in two weeks and 40 years. It was inside me for that long, and once it came out, it came out with a rush.”
The story is set in rural France during World War II, when the Nazis occupied the nation with the cooperation of many Frenchmen. It`s one of the most shameful episodes in French history, with countrymen informing on their brethern, particularly on Jews and resistance fighters.
Similar stories have been told in such superb French films as Marcel Ophuls` documentary ”The Sorrow and the Pity” (1970) and Malle`s own
”Lacombe, Lucien” (1974), the subtly shocking tale of a French boy who tortured and informed for the Gestapo.
”Au Revoir, Les Enfants” is based on Malle`s own boyhood experience in a Catholic boarding school, where wealthy families, such as his own, sent their children away from such hot spots as Paris. Many courageous clergymen-in this case, Carmelite teaching fathers-also used the schools as ”safe houses” for Jewish children on the run, who typically were supplied with false identity papers. Young Malle`s school was also a major resistance center.
In the film, a character named Julien Quentin represents Malle as a boy. Julien is a bright child whose attention is immediately commanded by the arrival in 1944 of an even smarter student named Jean Bonnet, who is noticeably vague about his past and the whereabouts of his parents.
Jean Bonnet is not his real name. He is Jewish, and the twin tensions of the film are whether his true identity will be uncovered and how Julien Quentin and others at the school will react.
The ever-present danger to the Jewish boy is prefigured by a scene in a restaurant, in which a French official, a lacky of the Germans, attempts to eject an elderly Jewish man who has been a fixture in the dining room for years.
Eventually, a bunch of German soldiers at a nearby table tells the Frenchman to leave the old man alone, as director Malle strikes a dagger into the heart of France`s once-secret shame-Frenchmen more eager than the Germans to do the Nazis` bidding. (The scene is based on an incident Malle heard about but was not witness to as a child.)
But whereas ”The Sorrow and the Pity,” an even more harrowing expose of complicity, was banned from French TV for a decade, ”Au Revoir, Les Enfants” has been enthusiastically received by the French filmmaking establishment and the public. The film is selling out in Paris and has been nominated for nine Cesars, the French Oscar.
”Times have changed,” said Malle, whose ”Lacombe, Lucien” was greeted with a chill 14 years ago. ”I think this film is both cathartic for me and for the audience. Nineteen forty-four is not that long ago. People remember, even if they would rather not.”
If you would rather not know how the movie turns out, you may want to skip the rest of this story. But surely you know what happened to so many French Jews and resistance fighters.
Indeed, to know that the young Jewish boy does not survive, but is killed (after the film ends) in a Nazi death camp is a foregone conclusion.
However, the way Malle tells the film`s penultimate, heartbreaking scene is a masterful piece of filmmaking. It`s also a complete invention of Malle`s. A Gestapo official enters the classroom looking for the last of three Jewish boys hiding at the school. As the officer speaks the Jewish boy`s real name, young Malle is horrified and instinctively turns his head toward his friend. That`s precisely the tipoff the Gestapo needs, and the Jewish boy`s fate is sealed, as well as the fate of the Carmelite father who had been protecting the child`s identity.
The guilt, however questionable, of Malle`s character in that episode has lingered with the real Louis Malle for more than 40 years.
”The timing of the scene is very important,” Malle said. ”It was an innocent act, and yet there is a responsibility that one must feel, one that a lot of Frenchmen and others who stood by and watched must share.”
In reality, Malle and the Jewish boy had not been friends. The boy-named Jean Kipplestein in the film and Hans Helmut Michel in real life-had arrived at the Catholic boarding school after Christmas vacation. Within weeks, his identity was revealed through school gossip and he was deported to Auschwitz and gassed. Malle traced the child`s fate in 1964, after the boy`s sister had written to the director.
When the film opened in France, Malle told the press that he has invented the friendship and the betrayal-as well as other details-as emblematic of the guilt he believes he and his countrymen share.
”My memory of that time is so clear,” Malle said. ”For the first time, I really observed the world around me. I experienced evil and I felt distanced from that world, and that sense of distance is what led me, I believe, to becoming a professional observer, a filmmaker.
”It was a turning point-encountering evil for the first time-that I think has struck a chord with all audiences.”
The film opens Friday in Chicago at the Fine Arts Theatre.
Malle was told that his film is certain to reinforce an American attitude toward the French-that they are a people without a moral compass.
”I know,” he said. ”They don`t have a moral compass. It`s a very old country, and many of the people don`t believe that the world has changed. They still think they are the center of the world and want to play a political and social role that they have lost. I was born and raised in France, but I don`t feel very French.”
Malle came to the United States in 1977 to make ”Pretty Baby,” but he has not given up his French citizenship. ”I`m too old to change. Also, it makes it easier for me to shoot in France, which I enjoy,” and where he and his family maintain an old country farm house in which they spend their summers.
”You know,” he said of his family, ”as much as `Au Revoir, Les Enfants` is my story, I really made it for my children.
”And it`s going to be a tough act to follow. I want to do a series of autobiographical films. But I don`t think the others will be quite this personal. I`d like to tell what it was like in Paris during the `50s, during the founding of the New Wave (of French filmmaking). I`d like to make a film about the French-Algerian war.
”When you reach a certain age,” said Malle, ”your past becomes an obsession.”
