Au Revoir Les Enfants, BFI

The BFI is often home to classic French films in London, and this latest revival of Louis Malle's devastating work, is something particularly special. By this late point in his career, Louis Malle – one of the radical enfants terribles of the French New Wave – had begun to lose friends and alienate critics with his increasingly conventional works. But though he veered toward the mainstream, Malle by no means softened nor sold out, as this devastating film proves.
Au revoir les enfants (1987) is the semi-autobiographical tale of Julien, a young boy sent to a Catholic boarding school in rural France, where he befriends a sensitive kid with a big secret. The year being 1944, tensions are rife at school and Nazi patrols are a fact of life. From this simple premise Malle spins out a searingly tragic story of comradeship and inadvertent betrayal, which touches on his favourite theme of adolescent awakening. As the film makes clear, Julien is a stand-in for the young Malle, and the director’s private anguish spills out in this most intimate of films, which he waited for over four decades to make. As a review for Au Revoir Les Enfants predicted at the time, this would become one of the greatest films ever made about childhood. And, indeed, this is one of the best films in cinema in London this month. Essential watching.