Years of Poems and Spirits

I am not a big fun of continental Euorpean movies. Nor are the holocaust ones. But Au revoir, les enfants is an exception. A very moving movie indeed. Unlike many French movies, it is full of outright conflicts and tensions. Yet still has the attention to details that is so French.

In the end, it is a new drama about the age old themes of friendship, loyalty, betrayal and lost innocence. The story is told in occupied France during WWII, of a Jewish boy hidding among a group of privileged Catholic boarding school boys. However, the suffering of the Jews and the evil of Nazism are used only to prop up an universal, perpetual theme–not vice versa. And that is why I like it.

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