malaikab I was so intrigued and touched by the Au Revoir Les Enfants movie that I researched the facts behind it. While browsing the internet, I found the NYT article dated 2/7/88 and titled "Malle Confronts Haunting Memory" which was written by Richard Bernstein. This NYT article examined the interesting facts surrounding director Louis Malle's school experiences at Petit College d'Avon. It also revealed the historical facts and names behind the real life characters who are depicted as Jean Bonnet, Negus, Jacques Dupre, and Pere Jean in the Au Revoir Les Enfants movie. About 43 or 44 years later,director Louis Malle found the courage to write and share his gamut of profound emotions on the silver screen about his experiences with his beloved former Petit College d'Avon colleagues and French school headmaster who still tugged indefinitely at his heart strings despite the passage of time.

aaronlromano I'm writing this review primarily as a means to decompress after just finishing the film. First off, the film was beautiful, probably one of Louis Malle's most beautiful films and has just toppled "Murmur of the Heart" as my favorite Louis Malle film. The film made me weep openly and unabashedly in front of my roommates (perhaps I'd be embarrassed if they weren't also weeping)and I am weeping still as I write this. I'm too emotional to even think of anything else to say other than it is an amazing film and utterly timeless. Whether or not you are Louis Malle fan, I urge you to watch this film, it is important and very much a masterpiece.

tieman64 "To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, all encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press." – Theodore Dalrymple Louis Malle's "Au Revoir Les Enfants" tells the tale of a young Jewish child who is sheltered from the Nazis (and Vichy police) by a Catholic school during World War 2. The film is the spiritual sequel to Malle's earlier "Lacombe, Lucian" - another autobiographical tale about a boy sold out to the Nazis - but is directed with much more skill. This is the glossiest and slickest of Malle's films.The bulk of the film concerns the blossoming friendship between a young French boy and Jewish boy, and their fears of living away from their parents and home. It is along these lines that the film works best, Malle capturing the confusion, fear, vulnerability and wonder of youth. One scene, a school organised treasure hunt in the woods, is powerful.While the film thinks it is "enlightened" and "liberal", it merely offers another form of anti-Semitism. Malle depicts Jews as cute, lovable, superior and exotic, systematically reversing the sinister venalities of Nazi agitprop. Malle's camera is infatuated with young, Jewish beauty, salivating over the Jewish child and fawning over his "talents", "innocence", "grace" and "allurement". In boot-licking the Jew's preciousness, the film not only suggests that a less attractive non-Jewish child is less worthy of being spared, but partakes in the very same kind of "objectification of humanity" that the Nazis did, such a stance being one of the psychological mechanisms that enabled the Holocaust and continues to fuel knee-jerk anti-Semitism today.The film is shot in icy greys, whites and blues, and is structured as a series of recollections by a now adult Malle (the tale is partially autobiographical). Malle's camera coddles and sighs over the Jewish boy, and then weeps when the kid is removed, during the film's climax, from the school compound by Nazi soldiers. Interestingly, it is a poor youth who turns the Jewish boy in to the Nazis; working class resentment smoothly misdirected toward society's scapegoats.8/10 - Worth one viewing.

Michael Neumann It took Louis Malle over forty years to write and direct this autobiographic coming-of-age story, in which he recalls an extraordinary moment from his childhood in Nazi occupied France when he betrayed, with an involuntary glance, a Jewish classmate attending his Catholic boarding school under an assumed name. The setting is a cloistered adolescent world of petty cruelties, minor triumphs, and a few not-so-childish secrets, with hardly a false note throughout. Even after four decades the details are crystal clear, showing none of the distortions or exaggerations of memory; every virtue of the film is so well balanced that each one is virtually invisible. The story is disarmingly simple and straightforward, and yet in its own restrained, undemonstrative way the final impact is heartbreaking. There is no gunfire, no bloodshed, no violence, but Malle reminds us that sometimes, on an all too personal level, the consequences of warfare are no less lethal for being so quiet.