Au Revoir les Enfants

The film was written and directed by Louis Malle, who based it on a childhood memory. Judging by the tears I saw streaming down his face on the night the film was shown at the Telluride Film Festival, the memory has caused him pain for many years. Read full review

It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes. Read full review

William Faulkner once made the sage point that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Louis Malle’s Golden Lion winner Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) is a Second World War-set film very much guided in spirit by the US novelist’s musing on the febrile relationship between memory, time and individual and collective histories. Read full review

A delicately rendered and exceptionally moving reminiscence of a boyhood friendship cut short by war. Read full review

It's a work that has the kind of simplicity, ease and density of detail that only a film maker in total command of his craft can bring off, and then only rarely. Read full review

It's arguably Malle's masterpiece, marked by a shooting style with little wasted motion or complication, emphasizing tiny, memorable details. Read full review

This restraint of acting and filmmaking results in a story that's all the more powerful. While many films try to force the audience into laughing and crying in the right places, Au Revoir les enfants invites us simply to watch, think, and feel according to our own perceptions. The result is touching in a way no manipulative film could equal. [12 Feb 1988, p.21]

It has the subtlety and devastating impact of Renoir’s prophetic classic Rules of the Game, and it is suffused with the calm, detached tragic irony and inevitability of the ancient Greek plays. Read full review

Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants is more than his wartime memoir; it is an epitaph to innocence. Read full review

Malle's film -- the most personal he's ever made -- goes out of its way not to tug on your heartstrings. Dealing with the most painful memory of his childhood in France during World War II, Malle has made a film of uncommon restraint. [15 Feb 1988, p.70]

There is not a moment in Goodbye, Children that fails to ring true. It's a beautiful film. [05 Feb 1988, p.C8]

Crisply photographed and directed with understated grace, the film can feel a little standoffish given the emotive subject matter. But with strong performances from the young leads and a vice-like air of mounting tension, it’s well worth revisiting. Read full review

Louis Malle, possibly at his best here. The drama is subtle but affecting. Read full review

Part dream, part nightmare, the film vividly remembers a traumatic moment in time that cannot be forgotten. Read full review

Part dream, part nightmare, the film vividly remembers a traumatic moment in time that cannot be forgotten. Read full review

Malle is certainly sincere in his efforts to describe the overall milieu accurately, and the film is less obnoxious than his pious Lacombe, Lucien (1973), which dealt with a related theme. Read full review

By many other directors' standards, Au Revoir would be a major achievement. But Malle has reached higher. If he'd made his childhood movie earlier in his career -- when he didn't have the sense to be so dispassionate -- it might have packed a meatier punch. Now it's just a deftly aimed poke. Read full review

The film (especially the first half) seems padded, formal, discreet. It's like watching a faded French classic.