It is Parents’ Weekend 1943 at St. John of the Cross, a Carmelite boarding school for boys in Nazi-occupied France. Père Jean (played by Philippe Morier-Genoud), the headmaster, is celebrating Mass. “My children, we live in a time of discord and hatred,” he preaches. “Lies are all-powerful. Christians kill one another. Those who should guide us betray us instead. More than ever, we must beware of selfishness and indifference.”
To judge by the parents’ expressions, this is not the anodyne, comforting homily they were expecting. They pay good money for their sons to receive a Catholic education; you suspect that they would rather be congratulated than challenged. But Père Jean is one of those troublesome priests who believes that the Gospel should not remain silent in times of oppression and violence.
Père Jean is inspired by Servant of God Père Jacques de Jésus, a French priest who sheltered Jewish refugees at his boarding school. Louis Malle, the influential filmmaker behind “My Dinner With Andre” (1981), was a student at the school at the time. Over forty years later he looked back with “Au Revoir les Enfants” (1987), a devastating portrait of lost innocence and incredible courage. The film won the Golden Lion at the 1987 Venice Film Festival and was included on the Vatican’s 1994 list of “some important films,” where it was highlighted for its depiction of Christian values.
The film centers on two students, Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) and Jean Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtő). Julien comes from a wealthy family and has a reputation for being tough despite his small stature. Bonnet is a mystery. He arrives at school right after Christmas break and is cagey about his family and background. Julien dismisses Bonnet because he is an outsider but eventually becomes friends with him at Père Jean’s encouragement. He soon discovers Bonnet’s secret: he is a Jewish refugee, hiding from the Nazis.
Malle captures adolescence with remarkable, and often uncomfortable, emotional clarity, as well as the camaraderie, curiosity and cruelty of teenage boys. The boys play at adulthood—they are more interested in (imagined) sex and learning to smoke cigarettes than in their algebra lessons—but remain fundamentally childish. The war is little more than background noise, the Nazi occupation a vague inconvenience. When the boys have to take shelter during an air raid, they cheer because it means they get out of class.
For Julien, that changes when he learns the truth about Bonnet. For the first time he begins to ask questions about the larger world and his place in it. He is familiar with the casual antisemitism that his classmates practice, but he does not even really know what Jews are. He has to ask his older brother (Stanislas Carré de Malberg), who wryly informs him: “Someone who doesn’t eat pork.” That seems to Julien to be an absurd reason to hate someone, but there is no more satisfying answer to his question: hatred, after all, is absurd.
Adolescence is a fraught and fragile time and, understandably, a time when we are unwilling to take social risks. Your own place in the pecking order always feels so tenuous; why would you risk it to align yourself with an outsider? But through his friendship with Bonnet, Julien does exactly that. He follows the example of Père Jean, who wants the boys to learn “to make good use of your freedom.”
This is a lesson that most of the adults Julien encounters have not learned. Many of them are as selfish, prejudiced and short-sighted as his classmates, only with greater consequences. During Père Jean’s homily, another student’s father angrily walks out of the chapel. The priest hasn’t said anything radical—or, more accurately, nothing that Jesus didn’t also say. But the parents are so focused on maintaining their comfortable lifestyles that they turn a blind eye to the Nazis. If you have convinced yourself that this is the reasonable, acceptable, adult thing to do, then Christ’s words will sound very radical.
And then there are the active collaborators, like the French militiamen who swagger around the town, conducting searches and demanding to see people’s documentation. Like the boys in the St. John’s schoolyard, they have chosen to become victimizers instead of victims, not realizing that this is infinitely worse. The Nazis, at least, are sincerely committed to their horrible ideology; the collaborators just want to be on the winning side. Late in the film, Julien learns that Joseph (François Négret), an older boy, has sold out innocent people to the Nazis. “Stop acting so pious,” he snaps, when Julien glares at him reproachfully. “There’s a war going on, kid.”
It would be simpler for Julien to make similar justifications and compromise himself. Instead, he follows the example of Père Jean and Bonnet, who are driven by values more powerful than self-interest. His ability to make change is limited, but he still chooses to—in the priest’s words— make good use of his freedom.
Watching the film now, as our country contends with further dehumanization and violence, Père Jean’s warning about selfishness and indifference seem more timely than ever. If selfless love is naïve, then we should all strive to be a little more childish.
“Au Revoir les Enfants” is streaming on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel.
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