Au revoir, les enfants (1988)
a film by Louis Malle
This movie will break your heart, and it will do it in a smart and beautiful way. It delivers outstanding images that will linger in your memory, it gets to show you great characters and
through the movie you get to make friends with them, then the evil shows up in the form of arbitrary and brutal authority, and if it does the trick, as it did on me, you would save your worst words for the bad guys.
After The Choristes it was hard to get to the top with a French Boarding School story but this one gets to it. The Boarding School gets a great environment for making a thoughtful story about the tough times of the Second World War. In the school people is forming ideas and opinions, they reflect what they learn in their homes but get the freedom to develop their own judgments.
This story doesn't try to moralize and it is its great success that it gets to move by generating ideas.
I like the characters and their relations: the elder brother with strong ideas, the younger brother spoiled by the mum, and the mum that show herself as this bourgeois neglected wife. It was the characters who make the story come together, is their humanity and diversity what makes it so moving and interesting.
I'm pretty sure that with time I'll get to remember many of the images in this movie because of its emotional content and great technical quality. It is not to be missed looking at all the characters laughing while watching Chaplin projected on the ragged screen with live music. It is shocking to see Nazi soldiers aligning kids that are half of their size against a wall. These scenes are still going around my head, and that is what the director delivers: an image, an emotion, a moment that is fixed in his memory and comes back to life in the film.
a film by Louis Malle
This movie will break your heart, and it will do it in a smart and beautiful way. It delivers outstanding images that will linger in your memory, it gets to show you great characters and
through the movie you get to make friends with them, then the evil shows up in the form of arbitrary and brutal authority, and if it does the trick, as it did on me, you would save your worst words for the bad guys.
After The Choristes it was hard to get to the top with a French Boarding School story but this one gets to it. The Boarding School gets a great environment for making a thoughtful story about the tough times of the Second World War. In the school people is forming ideas and opinions, they reflect what they learn in their homes but get the freedom to develop their own judgments.
This story doesn't try to moralize and it is its great success that it gets to move by generating ideas.
I like the characters and their relations: the elder brother with strong ideas, the younger brother spoiled by the mum, and the mum that show herself as this bourgeois neglected wife. It was the characters who make the story come together, is their humanity and diversity what makes it so moving and interesting.
I'm pretty sure that with time I'll get to remember many of the images in this movie because of its emotional content and great technical quality. It is not to be missed looking at all the characters laughing while watching Chaplin projected on the ragged screen with live music. It is shocking to see Nazi soldiers aligning kids that are half of their size against a wall. These scenes are still going around my head, and that is what the director delivers: an image, an emotion, a moment that is fixed in his memory and comes back to life in the film.
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