Au Revoir les Enfants is Louis Malle's attempt to give life and vision to a haunting memory from his wartime childhood. The film follows the growing friendship of two boys in a Catholic school-one, a Malle stand-in (mother fixation and all) named Julien (Gaspard Manesse), the other the mysterious Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtö), a Jewish boy hiding under a false identity. Bonnet's gawky shyness and odd habits continually set him apart (and set him up); Julien, strangely attracted to his lonely intelligence, makes it his business to find out why. Not since Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein has a film so perfectly-though here, perhaps, naively-conveyed the degree to which, in France, whether one was sympathetic or not, the Jew was the "other." With paranoia on one side, curiosity on the other, the friendship is necessarily an uneasy one; the film's tension comes from the constant threat that Julien, if only out of childhood's jerky impulses, might betray Bonnet. A seeming artlessness keeps the narrative within young Julien's scope-and sets the stage for a wrenching climax as the Gestapo swoop down on the school like cruel birds to take their prey, Bonnet and the priests. Like Malle's Lacombe Lucien, here is a painful exploration of individual responsibility; but more than that, it tells of a lifelong anxiety of powerlessness. The film, like the memory it is based on, has a built-in irony that its making probably did not expiate for Malle: for Julien, it represents childhood's end "and the discovery of the real world-its violence, its disorder, its prejudices." For Bonnet, né Kippelstein, it represents something far more final.