People think a lot about Anne Frank's family in the attic, and they think about the Nazis who arrested them and the snooping snitch who called the Nazis on them But not the many, many people who just went to work at that factory every day and just didn't care
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What gets me about Au Revoir Les Enfants is that Père Jean isn't any kind of "movie hero" He's a flawed person, he makes a really bad mistake and gets himself and his charges caught, he tried his best and his best was simply not good enough BUT HE'S THE ONLY ONE TRYING
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Heroes in real life usually fail Because by definition heroes are in the minority and stand alone To be a hero is to be asked to give more than any one person reasonably can The only way evil loses is everyone as a whole does the right thing and there's no need for heroes
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The whole thing of this movie where Julien doesn't have any malice, he's not a bad person, he likes the Jewish kid he meets as a friend He's a fucking kid for cripes sake But he's not *helping*, and neither is anyone else
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The actual hero of this movie, Père Jean, has his whole struggle mostly offscreen He is barely holding it together with the last of his strength, in the background of this random white boy's irrelevant coming of age story
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Our narrator getting into his exuberant youthful hijinks and getting into the hair of his school principal is piling more stress on his back and hastening his inevitable failure
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His whole "Oh no is the principal gonna call my dad on me" arc is nothing but the inciting incident for the Nazis dragging Père Jean and the Jewish boys he was hiding away to never be seen again
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There's a relevant critique of making a movie that so thoroughly centers a bystander rather than the victims of the regime But the movie is aware of this and engaging in self-crit the whole time, I think
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The ending where he says he'll never forget the morning the Nazis came for the rest of his life The knowledge *this was the most important story that ever happened to him* and he has to live with being an ignoble footnote in it Making this movie to try to confess that guilt
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I love that movie. Saw it when it first came out (as a young elementary school French student) and it gets better every time I see it. Really powerful stuff.
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