Premise: A young French boy attends a Roman Catholic boarding school during WWII that is secretly harboring Jewish students and teachers.
I'm as guilty as anyone of being glib about filmmakers' obsession with WWII and the Holocaust. It's annoying how synonymous those topics became with "Oscar gold". Or growing up, I knew that if there was ever a cranky older person in an episode of a show I watched, it would turn out that he or she was a Holocaust survivor. It all became really predictable and boring. The truth is though, the Holocaust deserved the decades of reckoning it received. 1940s Europe should've been too modern and stable for that to happen and on such a large scale. I can wrap my brain around how some of these genocides in third world countries could happen. They are still horrendous atrocities, but fair or not, I can see how the instability and lack of a world spotlight could allow them to happen. The Holocaust of WWII happened in the middle of one of the most modernized parts of the world though. The U.S. has a fascination with it and it didn't even happen to us. It must mess with Europeans who feel complicit in it in different ways.
That's why I'm refusing to be cynical about Au Revoir les Enfants. This movie is as personal as it gets for writer/director Louis Malle. He did go to a Roman Catholic boarding school during WWII where the gestapo found several Jewish children and teachers that the school was hiding who they sent to Auschwitz. While this film plays up certain elements, I fully believe the final words of the movie: "More than 40 years have passed, but I'll remember every second of that January morning until the day I die." And I'm sure Malle feels guilt in some way. That's why the "I could've done more" scene in Schindler's List hits so damn hard still.
I have a couple foundational problems with the movie. There's nothing I want less than to follow the world of adolescent boys for two hours. They suck. Even something as simple as the one kid licking Julien's vitamin cracker gave me PTSD. I wish there was a way to tell this story that didn't involve me following around these little shits for 1h45m. Once I got past that aspect though and started to see where the movie was going*, I was captivated by the movie. I was especially pleased that the movie didn't get super nihilistic. There's no excessive violence. I was worried there'd be public executions or casual murders like in Schindler's List. Instead, it's more about how people tried to normalize it all and pretend it wasn't happening. The German soldiers in this aren't heroes by any definition but that aren't exactly monsters either. Compared to a lot of people, Julien's (as a stand in for Malle) exposure to the war was pretty harmless to him, but it still affected him profoundly. For a movie that I kept putting off because it looked like a stuffy European movie, I ended up liking this a lot.
*I should note, I knew nothing about this going in. I had no idea about the setting, time period, or subject matter.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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