MALLE RELIVES TRAUMA OF HIS CHILDHOOD

In the German-occupied France of 1944, when Louis Malle was 12 and a student at the Petit College de Fontainebleau, the Catholic boarding school gave secret sanctuary to three Jewish boys. The subsequent Gestapo arrest of the school’s priest-director and the three boys--and their eventual execution at Auschwitz--was, according to Malle, “the most traumatic event of my life. . . . It is really what made me what I am and determined what I’ve done.”

What Louis Malle is--professionally--is a film director acclaimed for his sober intelligence and anarchic wit. What he has done for 30 years, first in France and more recently in America, is address a wide range of subjects both as storyteller (“The Fire Within,” “Murmur of the Heart,” “Atlantic City”) and documentarian (“Phantom India,” “God’s Country”), all the while avoiding this central experience of his life.

Until now.

“I mean, it is really loaded for me,” he said at the College de Sainte-Croix, the boarding school near Paris that stands in for Fontainebleau in the just-wrapped “Au Revoir, Les Enfants” (“Goodby, Children”). The director of Fontainebleau spoke the film’s title, plus an “ A bientot “ (“See you soon”) to the assembled student body as he and the three Jews were led away by the Germans.

“It’s normal, especially here in France, for a director’s first film to be autobiographical,” Malle continued. “I always felt that I could only dare to talk about something really intimate after I’d achieved a certain control of the medium. Although many of my early films were close to me, I was almost 40 before I dared to deal with certain elements of my childhood.”

That was in “Murmur of the Heart,” which could be said to deal with Malle’s loss of sexual innocence. Through the startling 1971 comedy about mother-son incest--startling first because it was a comedy--Malle exorcised his adolescent fantasy of sex with his mother. “That,” he noted, “was a picture I could never have made when I was in my 20s, because that (fantasy) is not something you remember when you’re 21, it’s repressed.”

It took another 16 years before he could deal, through his “Au Revoir” alter ego named Julien Quentin, with a more cosmic loss of innocence. “I’m talking about a sudden confrontation with violence and injustice and racism--the world of adults,” he said. “About this overwhelming friendship between Julien and the Jewish boy called Jean Bonnet which is suddenly cut off--which is intolerable for a child.”

Two things acted together to make “Au Revoir” a sudden, urgent priority for Malle. At 54, he has a sense of time rushing on. And there was the difficulty after the box-office disasters “Crackers” (1984) and “Alamo Bay” (1985) in arranging American studio financing for “Eye Contact,” a contemporary comedy about American expatriates written by John Guare (“Atlantic City”), which Malle hopes to shoot this fall in Italy.

“Louis wrote the first draft of ‘Au Revoir’ last summer in France--in longhand, in three weeks, between playing tennis and kayaking,” recalled Malle’s wife, actress Candice Bergen, who was visiting the set and shooting photos. “He was very easy to live with while doing it.”

“I wrote ‘Murmur of the Heart’ in one week,” Malle laughed. “This took three because of my almost forgetting the French language during my (decade-long) stay in America.” And because of other problems, some of which took two more drafts to resolve.

“There was,” he said, “the problem of reorganizing time, taking events that occurred over an hour--or weeks--of real time and reducing them to five minutes of dramatic time.

“There was point of view,” he continued. “For example, in ‘Lacombe, Lucien’ (Malle’s 1974 study of the evolution of an adolescent French peasant into a Nazi bully boy), he was simply looked at by the camera. Here, I decided that the point of view from beginning to end should be that of Julien looking at this intruder in his world.”

Most of his efforts were focused on creating quirky and often self-contradictorally real characters, then finding the right actors to play them.

Julien, for example, is partly a sheltered, slightly mother-fixated rich boy and partly an insatiably curious budding intellectual. The young Jew Bonnet knows he should remain inconspicuous, yet one day in chapel he can’t restrain himself from putting his beret on the back of his head, like a yarmulke. The school’s director is sermonizes harshly on the selfishness and intolerance of his rich flock during parents’ day--yet rocks with laughter at a Chaplin movie. Julien’s mother, “much closer,” Malle admitted, to his own late sugar-heiress parent than the mother in “Murmur,” has the form-observing blindness of the French grande bourgeoisie , but also great reserves of tenderness.

Determined to use unknowns in the juvenile roles, Malle found his Julien (insouciant, blond, Eton-cropped 11 1/2-year-old Gaspard Manesse) and his Bonnet (dreamy-gawky, dark-curly-haired 12 1/2-year-old Raphael Fejto) through casting calls announced on radio and TV programs and in magazines for kids.

“Of course, it’s crazy,” he allowed, “to mix a stage actor like Philippe Morier-Genoud (the priest) with completely inexperienced actors, but it worked quite well with Holger Lowenadler, who played the father in ‘Lacombe, Lucien,’ and I was willing to try it again.”

Malle’s speed in getting “Au Revoir” going is also a function of its low (even by French standards) budget of $1.8 million, 10% of which came from a government subsidy, 20% from an advance against German distribution rights and 70% from French theatrical, TV and cassette rights. (A U.S. distributor will be sought after Malle completes a subtitled print, probably in July.) The small size of the film’s crew gave a general lightness to the proceedings on the set and, Racette said, the director has rendered the nervous-making assignment of playing “his” mother “so easy. . . . In the shooting he experiments with the actors, he’s not rigid.”

In fact, though, on the day Racette said this, Malle was made visibly uneasy and admittedly “rigid with fear--really terrified all over again” by the presence on location of Laure Michel Tourtibatte, another participant in his real-life story.

Mme. Tourtibatte is the older sister of Hans-Helmut Michel, who took the nom de guerre Jean Bonnet when he entered Malle’s class at Fontainebleau. She is also the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. Long aware of Malle’s success as a director, she wrote him in 1964 with the then, to him, “horrifying suggestion” that he put his--their--wartime experience on film. Now, having heard that he was doing so, she showed up unannounced to watch him at work.

To watch him for hours on end, with an impassivity so unsettling that even the reporter hesitated twice before introducing himself and asking if it was painful to watch this reenactment of her brother’s life.

“No, no,” she replied with the poignant equanimity sometimes found in Holocaust survivors. “Certainly the loss of my family was difficult, and my brother’s death was much harder to endure than my mother’s. I thought that because he was so young somehow he would survive.”

Still, when Tourtibatte paused to watch Raphael Fejto capering with a puppy, her equanimity gave way to an even more poignant smile--before it returned.

“He does--and doesn’t--remind me of my brother,” she said. “I understand that this is partly a fiction and I don’t expect it to represent reality exactly. And in any case, the immediate details are not so important as the larger meaning of the story, especially at this time when some of the same tendencies of that (wartime) period threaten us all again.”

In this, she and Louis Malle are d’accord .