Books, Arts & Manners: Revisionist Autobiography

One of the hallmarks of a good film is that it stays in your mind: certain images, scenes, bits of dialogue —even a movement here, an expression there—become part of your experience just as if you had lived them, which, in a sense, you have. Not so in

Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les enfants, a film that goes by you with a minimum of lasting impressions, and which the memory seems almost eager to relinquish. Not because this would-be autobiographical story about Nazi persecution of the Jews in France hurts too much, but because a subject of immense import emerges rather disembodied, lightweight.

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John Simon

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One of the hallmarks of a good film is that it stays in your mind: certain images, scenes, bits of dialogue —even a movement here, an expression there—become part of your experience just as if you had lived them, which, in a sense, you have. Not so in

Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les enfants, a film that goes by you with a minimum of lasting impressions, and which the memory seems almost eager to relinquish. Not because this would-be autobiographical story about Nazi persecution of the Jews in France hurts too much, but because a subject of immense import emerges rather disembodied, lightweight.