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Sorrow and pity were a civilian's principal emotions during the Occupation, says Marcel Ophuls, for contrast Louis Malle gives the collaborator's vacant mind. The old order lies moribund in the hospital, the teenage orderly (Pierre Blaise) takes a break from mopping floors and emptying chamber pots to slingshot the robin tweeting by the window. (Chickens and rabbits don't fare much better in his hands, a dying equine receives rare tenderness.) The Resistance won't have him, "too many boys like you," the Gestapo is his next option just because he gets a flat tire and is caught after curfew outside the headquarters. Petty power suits the bored bumpkin, he coasts through the summer before the Liberation on his lack of ideology and morality. The Jewish maiden in hiding named France (Aurore Clément) is the object of his desire, her father (Holger Löwenadler) looks at him with doleful puzzlement: "It's strange. Somehow I can't bring myself to completely despise you." Wartime evil from without and within, the void easily filled, a dispassionate view. Occupants of the Vichy hotel include a cycling champion and a movie starlet, a Great Dane guards the stairs à la Strangers on a Train. (The cool scrutiny is suffused with cinephile memories, Roma Città Aperta for tortures echoing next to carefree children and Le Silence de la Mer for the family's uninvited visitor.) Not overburdened with intelligence, the sullen lad enjoys his new suit and machine-gun and destroying the lavish model ship belonging to a bourgeois fancy-pants, then switches sides over a pocket watch. A poisoned pastoral, hundreds of accusatory letters a day mailed to the invaders, "a real mania," cf. Clouzot's Le Corbeau. Malle reconsiders "la revanche de l'histoire" in Au revoir les enfants. "He's young, he doesn't understand." Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli. With Therese Giehse, Stéphane Bouy, Loumi Iacobesco, Jean Bousquet, René Bouloc, Pierre Decazes, Jean Rougerie, Gilberte Rivet, Cécile Ricard, and Jacqueline Staup.
--- Fernando F. Croce |