Louis Malle's autobiographical war film, about the harboring of three incognito Jewish students in an exclusive Catholic boys' school, makes a nice companion to his Lacombe, Lucien -- nice and quiet and well-mannered, where the earlier one was more aggressive and apt to ruffle feathers. It's something of a corrective to that one, too: let's admit, it wants to say, that there were collaborators under the Nazi Occupation (the real-life prototype of young Monsieur Lacombe can be detected here in a bit-part), but let's not forget there were also resisters. The unfolding story of loyalty and betrayal is treated in the sort of style that's sometimes said not to draw attention to itself, though it could just as well be said, in this case anyway, not really to compel attention either. On the one hand Malle must have felt a legitimate fear of cheapening the story -- his story -- with trumped-up melodramatics. On the other hand there needed to be some fear of underselling it as well, of counting too much on it to sell itself. Lacombe, Lucien was no less rigorously controlled, but it tugged a little harder at the leash. Au Revoir is mannerly to the point of mannered. Or near enough. With Gaspard Manesse and Raphael Fejto. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd