Hard Rites Of Passage

By RICHARD CORLISS

Did European children ever have childhoods? Not in the '40s and '50s anyway, to judge from a bunch of recent movies. Death's shadow dogged a boy's heels; responsibility came early, and guilt tagged along. Kids grew up faster, tougher, with fewer fantasies and more urgent everyday nightmares. In wartime or in uneasy peace, childhood was no romp in the meadows of innocence; the evidence is on the screen. Two top contenders for this week's Oscar nominations focus on English boys growing up during World War II. In Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, a lad gets shanghaied into maturity at the cost of his old principles; in John Boorman's Hope and Glory, a boy finds German fire bombs virtually on his front porch. Neither child would fit comfortably into a Hollywood idyll, past or present, where kids are expected to have reality-resistant minds and hang out forever at the soda fountain of youth.

Another Oscar prospect, Lasse Hallstrom's hit Swedish comedy My Life as a Dog, teaches that pubescence is a messy uphill battle. And now two French films arrive to clinch the argument that in Europe, childhood is a daunting entrance exam for premature adulthood. Their plot is archetypal: a boy is sent away from home for a wrenching rite of passage. In Jean-Loup Hubert's The Grand Highway, the lad learns conventional wisdom, and the film evokes familiar smiles and tears. In Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants, the Nazi occupation of France triggers a boy's crisis of conscience. Malle's movie, sure to be nominated for the foreign-language Oscar, is the bleak, heartbreaking goods, but it shares with the Hallstrom and Hubert films a stringent modesty of tone. All three pictures build their stories through brief snapshots of childhood traumas, like pulsars of memory from the past we all live in.

Leave it to a man named Lasse to direct the most scrupulously endearing Dog movie of the '80s. Hallstrom's hero is twelve-year-old Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius), a dour, dimpled soul who could live by the maxim: Expect the worst and you'll never be disappointed. A tabloid junkie, Ingemar scans headlines for catastrophes that might put his own aggrieved existence into perspective. Reading them helps Ingemar shrug off his own doglike life: "It could have been worse." So his Mom is ailing, and his beloved pooch is sent on a terminal vacation, and the town's toughest athlete is a gorgeous girl (Melinda Kinnaman). Even for a boy in 1958, it could be worse. He seems to know already that anyone who can survive childhood can thrive as a grownup.

Easy to see why My Life as a Dog was last year's most popular foreign- language film in the U.S. For all its hints of death and humiliation, the picture has a jaunty air -- a Truffaut paean to childhood, set to a silly, danceable beat. In this village everyone is ripe for fond laughter: the uncle whose rapport with Ingemar puts his wife at a distance; the old lodger whose only pleasure is reading lingerie ads; the tomboy who bandages her breasts to masquerade for a last summer as one of the boys. At the picture's heart is the irrepressible Glanzelius, an imp from a cathedral cornice. This ageless face has seen it all; Dog works because the little boy in Ingemar is eager to see more.

A boy's life is much the same, the same year, in Brittany. The Grand Highway packs nine-year-old Louis (Antoine Hubert, the writer-director's son) off to the home of Pelo (Richard Bohringer) and Marcelle (Anemone) while Louis's mother gives birth. As the son Pelo and Marcelle never had, Louis brings out their competitive animosity. But he would rather waste time with Martine (Vanessa Guedj), a year older, who likes to drop live eels down his bathing suit. Young Guedj comes on like a precocious minx, and the whole film is a bit too ingratiating, American-style. Highway proves how indulgent memory can be. It can wrap reprobates in ermine and bathe tatty lives in endless sunlight. So the ending, with Pelo and Marcelle reconciled, rings both false and forgiving. Who would deny this battling couple an improbable happily-ever- after?

None of this for Louis Malle. He has made four earlier films with kids at their core, and he is beyond sentimentalizing them. At the start of Au Revoir les Enfants, Malle seems beyond dramatizing them too. We have seen these vignettes before -- a fat boy fainting at Mass, children sharing guilty pleasures after dark, a dormitory lad wetting his bed -- all the secrets and sadism of school life. Roll call, please! Zero de Conduite, Forbidden Games, ^ The 400 Blows. French filmmakers do this sort of thing so well, and so often.

It is devious, Malle's lullaby of cliches. He wants us to see what is ordinary about these children before he reveals what is unique. Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) is clever, curious, radiating star quality. But now there is a new star in class, Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejto), who moves in an air of mystery and gets higher marks. He is also a Jew, under cover at this Catholic school. "But what are they guilty of?" a schoolboy asks about the Jews. "Being smarter than us," comes the answer. "And crucifying Jesus." The Nazi occupiers and their French supporters have as sophisticated a theory. They are ready to act on it.

Tragedy awaits. Meanwhile, irony abounds. At Mass one day, the Jewish boy strides to the Communion rail in an act of both submission and defiance. He thus challenges the brave priest who has agreed to camouflage him. Will the priest commit sacrilege or risk exposing Bonnet as an infidel? It is one of many dilemmas with potentially fatal consequences. In this frightening and beautiful film, a schoolboy must learn hard lessons early. "Are you scared?" Julien asks Bonnet. His reply might stand for every child in every European film: "All the time."