During the Second World War, the movement against German occupation in Nazi-occupied France became known as the French Resistance. A monk involved in that movement ran a boarding school. French filmmaker Louis Malle studied at that school. He was eleven then. During mid-term, three Jewish boys were admitted to the school—boys who were fleeing from the notorious German Gestapo forces. The headmaster knew about it. He was the one who gave them the opportunity to enroll in the boarding school to hide from the Nazi forces. Someone from the school itself betrayed them, passing information about those Jewish boys to the Gestapo. One morning in 1944, Gestapo members came to the school and took away those three Jewish boys and the headmaster. Malle had befriended one of those three. That ugly morning changed Malle. That little Malle decided he would grow up to make films, to tell everyone about this injustice through cinema. But Malle didn’t make his first film about that incident; rather, after waiting nearly ten years, he made the film in 1987, naming it ‘Goodbye, Children.’ By then he had already honed his craft making two dozen films and documentaries.
What happened after that day’s events was this: those Jewish boys were murdered in gas chambers. Malle didn’t need much imagination to create the film’s story. Because the school Malle showed in the film was just like the one he himself had attended, the environment and rules there were exactly as he described in his script. Though Malle never learned who committed the betrayal, in the film he has it done by a boy who did odd kitchen chores, secretly bringing food and cigarettes from outside for the adolescent students—a boy who was dismissed from school and expelled on charges of theft. After the headmaster’s arrest, the school was shut down, which is also shown in the film. Before making the film, Malle found a Catholic private school that looked similar to his own school for shooting. The school was in a suburb a little distance from Paris. The exquisite natural surroundings of the school were enchanting. Almost everything Malle showed in the film came from events in his own life. If anyone wants to know how students live in boarding schools, their psychology, the minutiae of daily life, they can learn much by watching this film.
After finishing the script, he showed it to his elder brother, also a former student of that school, and to some teachers who were still alive then. When the school’s headmaster Father Jean was being taken away, all the school’s students stood in line, and the Father’s last words to them were: Goodbye, children. The film shows exactly this. The incident in Malle’s life occurred sometime in the middle of winter. To capture the essence of 1944, Malle shot the film in winter. The school’s students had to endure some hardship, but the film has earned its place among masterpieces. Malle has worked with children in many films. As a result, he understands children’s psychology very well.
The two children who played the main characters in the film—Malle’s character and the Jewish boy’s character—had never acted in films before, but the performances Malle drew from them were truly extraordinary! Malle was so impressed with their work that he believed if he hadn’t found them, he would have had to abandon the film project! Raphaël Fejtö played the Jewish boy, and Gaspard Manesse played Malle’s role. Interestingly, Gaspard Manesse was actually a very shy, introverted, timid boy, just as Malle had been in childhood; though in the film his character is that of a spirited, extroverted teenager. In the film, Malle’s name is Julien. One day twelve-year-old Julien asks his thirteen-year-old elder brother, “Well, what wrong have the Jews done?” The elder brother replies, “They killed Christ.” Julien then says, “I thought the Romans killed Christ.” Hearing this, the elder brother becomes somewhat flustered and says, “They don’t eat pork and they’re smarter than us…We can’t tolerate those who are smarter than us because they’re not like us, so we hate them. This is how it has been in the world, is happening, and will happen.”
In this film, alongside presenting a terrifying experience from his childhood memories, Malle has very skillfully drawn a portrait of the school children. Their innocent and corrupted aspects both emerge. The mischief of boarding school life, friendship, quarrels, bizarre games, poor-quality food, secret cigarette smoking, going on adventures, wetting beds, various dirty thoughts of adolescence, secretly looking at erotic magazines while fooling the adults—everything comes into the film quite naturally. When the grotesque face of cruelty appears in an innocent environment, yet there’s nothing one can do to stop it, how helpless and despairing it feels—the film tells exactly that story. In Malle’s words, his autobiographical film ‘Goodbye, Children’ is seventy-five percent fiction, the rest truthful narration. What Malle has constructed through fiction is essentially a rumination on a melancholy memory from the past. This nostalgic film has no melodrama, not a single irrelevant scene, no pompous dialogue. Everything that came through Malle’s lens is honest and necessary.
In the film, Julien reads voraciously and is somewhat arrogant by nature. He has all the characteristics of any other teenager. Nowhere in the film does he speak philosophically or behave in a way that would be inappropriate for someone his age. On the other hand, the Jewish boy doesn’t mix much with others, is quiet by nature, somewhat withdrawn, and everyone tends to avoid him. He reads books by himself, spending time following class routines and boarding school discipline. Perhaps he keeps himself so hidden to conceal his Jewish identity from others. He was the only exception. He had befriended Julien; the two once went on an adventure to a distant forest, from where police brought them back. Their friendship deepened then. Interest in the same forbidden activity brings two people closer to each other. We seem to find Phatik from Rabindranath’s story “Chhuti” in that school. “There is no such nuisance in the world as a boy of thirteen or fourteen.” In the film, among the teenagers come friendship and betrayal, self-respect and guilt, cooperation and opposition, life versus art—everything comes as the story requires, at a natural pace, nowhere does any scene feel imposed.