Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Ian (Flash Review)This film takes place in 1944. The viewer is placed in a Catholic school in France where a mother has abruptly sent her Jewish son to go to school to avoid getting captured in Paris by the Nazi's. The film focuses very little on that heavy topic but primarily on the Jewish boy and the friendships he makes with a Christian boy who keeps his true identity a secret. There are endless scenes of boys being boys in school and doing their things, which is fine for character development which eventually builds up to a heavy emotional scene at the end. It was a good drama, nice little scenes but lacked intrigue. One of these films I heard tossed around a lot in discussions so I had to check it out.

David Conrad This French WWII film confines Nazis and freedom fighters to the background in deference to a segment of the population that is typically relegated to one-dimensional supporting roles: children. It is a fresh point of view, and one with many potential pitfalls, but Louis Malle's careful execution and commitment to truth carry it through. Basing the story on his own experiences at a Catholic boarding school in Nazi-occupied France, he draws on detailed memories of the cruelty and naivety of children. The students in "Au Revoir Les Enfants" are not precocious, like so many movie youths, but they do have individual talents and interests, and they enjoy pretending to be sophisticates. They try to talk dirty, they exaggerate their experiences, and they pretend not to miss their parents when all they think about privately is how they long to be with them. They all have problems and insecurities, as well, that expose them to the insensitive taunts of their peers. One boy has night terrors, one is anemic and faints during mass, and the protagonist is a bed-wetter.But these are nothing compared to the dangerous secret that some boys are hiding. The lead boy, Julien, whom a teacher describes as intelligent and a bit pretentious, reluctantly befriends a new student, Jean. They share a love of reading, but Julien resents the fact that Jean is a smarter than he and more of a teacher's favorite. Jean is sensitive, and therefore an easy target, so Julien quickly discovers his weak point. But he withholds the valuable information, recognizing its importance without fully understanding its meaning: Jean is Jewish, taking refuge in the school under a false name.It is hard to find your way to this movie without knowing that key plot point, so even before it comes to the forefront Malle begins exploring it through artful verbal and visual cues. Early on, two students in the schoolyard pretend to be knights engaged in combat. One of them, secretly Jewish, chooses to play the part of a Saracen knight. The other students call him an infidel, and only Jean cheers for him. But such moments of agency in which Jean can express his identity without outing himself are few. More often, he is at risk of appearing different because of things he cannot do: he cannot recite the Hail Mary and other prayers with the rest of the students, cannot eat pork when it is offered, and cannot receive communion.The communion scene is particularly interesting because it shows the limitations of the school headmaster's charity. After delivering a ringing sermon to wealthy parents about the need to give generously to those in need, Jean comes to the front to receive communion. The headmaster passes him over since he knows Jean is not a Catholic. The moment might have been too-on-the-nose but for the interesting questions it raises. Does Jean intend only to strengthen his disguise by joining in this ritual? Does he do it to better fit in with his peers, and to get closer to his friend Julien? Or, as I tend to think, does he do it because the headmaster's sermon has deeply moved him? In any case, this is one of several moments that make us wonder whether the headmaster could have done more to keep his Jewish charges safe.Another is the decision that brings about the end of the ruse. The students and teachers gather to watch Charlie Chaplin's "The Immigrant" (a 27 year-old film, but there is a war on and it is a religious school). Images of The Tramp and a woman sliding around a rolling ship give way to Malle's shots of a brawl on icy pavement between the school's cook and crippled kitchen boy. The boy, perhaps 18 years old, has been running a black market in preservatives, so the headmaster fires him. In retaliation, the boy notifies the local Gestapo that the school is harboring Jews. The headmaster is a hero who shelters Jews at the risk of his own safety, yet his incomplete committal to his espoused principles creates an opportunity for his work to be undone. Still, he falls gracefully. He courageously delivers the titular farewell when he is marched off to share the Jewish students' inevitable fate—a fate Malle has foreshadowed in a tense but beautiful forest sequence midway through the film.The movie's Nazis are one-note, but this is not a problem so long as they are kept in the background. When they show up in force at the end, they indulge in a bit too much leering and mustache-twirling for a film that is primarily interested in the hypocrisy and indifference of the French rather than the blatant barbarism of the Germans. But nothing diminishes the impact of the film's final lines, which are delivered almost without emotion in a voice-over by an adult Julien. The window on the atrocities of WWII that he had as a child was a narrow and privileged one, and his understanding of them was imperfect, but the sudden and permanent loss of a friend became a searing and defining memory for him. By looking at the period and place through a child's eyes, Malle demonstrates that no amount of insularity or innocence could keep one blind as to what was happening to Europe's Jewish population.

Chris Silver Au Revoir Les Enfants- France 1987This is #4 on the list.This movie, is heartbreakingly true. It's sad, and the whole spectrum is sad.Saying that, and knowing I have empathy towards all those affected by the holocaust and how tragic it was. But this movie was not at all what I thought it would be. Coming in expecting a heart-tear-wrenching movie that would make me sad, happy, and emotional. But besides the idea of this being a true story, no, It did nothing for me. The directing was cliché for this type of movie, but I was expecting that. But I had no idea that the film would be so, so, out of the ordinary in character development as well as plot movement. The characters don't do much "developing" till half way till the movie is over. Hell, the two main characters who are supposed to be friend, don't even become apprentices till late in the movie.There is not much to say about the movie and the production efforts because they were predictable. But the story, could've been told so much better. Maybe I am just that really awful and cruel guy who can't appreciate the movie for what it is because I thought the story should've been more dramatized but hey, I'm a child of the 21st century. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate it, but I can't say I relatively "Liked" it.SilverRating: 5/10

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.