French Cinema: Au Revoir Les Enfants (Louis Malle, 1987)

(contains spoilers)  This film, whose title means "Good bye, Children" is a semi-autobiographical film (directed by Louis Malle) about a Catholic boarding school during the Nazi occupation of France and the tightening noose around the Jewish boys the school is harboring.  The war and the fact that the Germans are losing it is making matter all the worse for the boys.  They are crammed into a large common room for meals and into large rooms full of beds.  They are as boys will be, horrible to one another, calling each other names, stealing things from each other, bartering for cigarettes with the crippled boy servant who works with the cook.  The food is bad and the rooms are cold.  Nevertheless this is where the children of affluent French parents sent their boys to school. 

It is a claustrophobic world made even more so by the Nazi occupation and the Milice, who are French collaborators who do the lower level policing in the community. The boys are finally betrayed when the crippled boy servant is fired for stealing and in response he reports the school to the Gestapo.  The school is closed and the three Jewish boys (or at least the ones they know about) and the Priest who is responsible for this concealment are led away.   A voiceover explains that all of them die later in concentration camps. 

It is thus a heartbreaking story of young boys whose lives are cut short at the brink of adult life, with its widening vistas of knowledge, action, and possibility, the uneven transition between the childish and the very serious, the comic and the tragic.   It was a great film, but I am not sure I enjoyed watching it all that much.