Screen:

...Two elements are overdone: the child's active questioning of Pelo and Marcelle about their dead son and his sexually wild, little girl companion, Martine (Vanessa Guedge...

...Two scenes are key to the bonding: one school "treasure hunt" in the woods that turns to terror when the two boys are left behind at night...

...Manesse is mystified at first about the most intellectual of the boys, renamed Bonnet...

...Why are the European films so much better...

...Malle, who dealt with French collaboration in Lacombe Lucien, paints a complex picture of wartime morality...

...SCREEN YESTERDAY'S CHILDREN MALLE'S 'ENFANTS' & HUBERT'S 'HIGHWAY' Ever since Frangois Truffaut made his two gems that gently deromanticized youth (the autobiographical 400 Blows and the historical The Wild Child), the childhood memoir has had a fascination for filmmakers...

...One possible reason is generational-the American "boomers" will always be better at being than having children...

...The child is passive, almost frail...

...he provides instead calm efficiency...

...Set in a nursery filled with toys-which had been locked up, as in a Dickens novel, ever since Marcelle and Pelo lost an infant son-the assault begins the convincing changes traced in the film's second half...

...Both scenes are such realistic depictions of ordinary childhood experiences that their extraordinary conclusions, with Germans or Vichy police, seem at once both believable and outrageous...

...The toughest scene in the film (and because of its realism, the toughest in many a recent film) involves marital rape, which the child overhears while clutching his bedsheets at night...

...Certainly there is an artistic . challenge in saying anything new...

...there are no funny rural eccentrics, unless one counts the long-winded cure and his-long limbed walks around the village, prayerbook in hand, like some cop on a spiritual beat...

...Malle eschews caricature Nazis and wild Resistance histrionics...

...Only one native film about babies was decent, Raising Arizona, whose makers had the wit to unleash the full force of their vulgarity...

...As in My Life as a Dog, the child's perspective dominates...

...He befriends one of the new Jewish boys whom Father Jean, the prefect, attempts to hide as a regular student toward the end of the war...

...the grand highway involves a pilgrimage...

...In the European memoirs, the childish monotone of the baby movies yields in two directions-to the childlike and to the adult...

...and a Sunday dinner with Manesse's mother when she visits...

...This terrible scene is pivotal...

...If he could take his eyes off the view...

...One scene where Martine sings arias for the Queen of the Night rang untrue...

...Whilean older sensibility looks back to childhood, it stays adult and is never allowed to displace the child, whose troubled, confused perspective dominates...

...It is a near masterpiece...

...His new society in the village is also not so sweet...

...Malle himself, as a schoolboy, is played by Gaspard Man-esse...

...While he sometimes goes too far with the strategy, here he succeeds magnificently, especially in a closing scene which brings home the cold finality of a Gestapo raid...

...The Grand Highway charms by quiet significance...

...in the American, confounded...

...The genre and these particular examples are all European films, and in striking contrast to the recent flood of American "baby" movies: Raising Arizona, Baby Boom, Three Men and a Baby, and She's Having a Baby...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...when he is "farmed out" to the village by his pregnant mother (who has been abandoned by the father), he expresses his feelings by crying into her dress at a bus stop...

...The plot calls for some precociousness, but both examples seem excessive...

...In the baby movies, American adults don't act comically but childishly...

...Au Revoir fuses absolute sincerity and high art...

...L Malle's metier has always been crafty ^^m ^IR understatement...

...Upon arriving in the village (circa 1950) a frightened, Parisian ten-year-old, Louis (Antoine Hubert, son of the director), sees a rabbit clubbed and skinned, hardly a genial prelude...

...While some German combat soldiers are seen humanely, the camera almost hisses at the Vichy thugs...

...At least they attained a style equal to their insights: cartoon, The Grand Highway (Le Grand Chemin) is set in one of those villages in rural France where, from the church steeple, all you see is another village and church steeple across a wide, lush valley...

...Now we have Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants and Jean-Loup Hubert's The Grand Highway...

...some of the schoolboys, unaware of the secret, parrot their parents' anti-Semitic language...

...Would that every discussion of these events had such inclusive honesty...

...he learns his real name is Kippelstein and insensitively teases him, then keeps the secret and befriends him...

...The film is the gift of his memory...

...the sitcom level of taste is infantile (for example, the...

...A nun betrays the last Jewish child, but members of the staff and Father Jean are treated like heroes, and the latter is carted away to Mathausen...

...Some observers profess fatigue with literary and cinematic examinations of the Holocaust...

...Malle manages by sticking with his facts...

...accordingly, its final sentiment is earned...

...Homes are seen honestly in this film, with all their warts...

...Our addiction to innocence is part of the problem...

...Louis responds less passively to his terror than we expect, and Hubert makes credible the way the child's sensitivity works a small domestic miracle...

...In his adopted "home" (overlooking a cemetery) the child is treated well by his mother's girlfriend Marcelle (Anemone), but is terrified by her surly, alcoholic, carpenter husband Pelo-the dour veteran actor, Richard Bohringer...

...Two of last year's examples of the genre are: Lasse Halstrom's My Life as a Dog and John Boorman's Hope and Glory...

...It helps that the Gestapo officer is played by Peter Fitz, a face familiar to some audiences from his role as a "humane" Nazi in The Wansee Conference...

...diaper humor of Three Men, and its possible sexual overtones...

...In the European films the generations are distinguished...

...This survey of life, backed up by inclusion of the cemetery in many shots, provides a symbolic resonance to the title...

...Hubert manages to insinuate all ages and relations into the screenplay: the celibate priest, the widow (an old woman who constantly waters and weeds the grave of her husband), children at different stages of development, marriages starting, marriages barely surviving, marriages broken up...

...But Hubert gives her some delightfully naughty lines, especially on the church roof where she uses the steeple gutters so grotesquely and comically that it might make one of the gargoyles blush...

...he gives renewed feeling to old truths...

...H^^ u Revoir les Enfants is Louis Malle's ^^B^^^ memoir of schooldays shared with young ^^^V^^^k Jewish boys trying to evade the Nazis...

...Malle has had a distinguished career (this April, the Museum of Modern Art will mount a retrospective), and brings to Au Revoir not just his feelings and memories but his genius for composition that gives ordinary scenes (at bathhouses, music lessons, or in the old white-sheeted dormitory of the school) a vibrant intensity...

...here, however, there is nothing poetic about him, no soliloquies, no naif existentializing about fate...

...As a result, there is a conviction of having been there even after the surprise of Malle's voice-over at the end of the film, when (with the camera on Manesse), he claims that he has never forgotten that day in January 1944...