7 French Cesars for Malle, ‘Les Enfants’

The French film industry is ailing. Many analysts blame television, but some influential critics and directors believe that all the industry needs for recovery are a few more films like Louis Malle’s “Au Revoir Les Enfants.”

That feeling dominated the glittering celebration Saturday night when the French Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences, in nationally televised ceremonies unabashedly patterned after the American Oscar awards, presented the Cesar for best movie of 1987 to the 55-year-old Malle’s autobiographical, sensitive film about the relationship between a young student and his doomed Jewish classmate in a Catholic boarding school under the Nazi occupation during World War II.

“Au Revoir Les Enfants,” which has been nominated this year for an American Academy Award as best foreign-language film, took six other Cesars as well: Malle was honored for best direction and best screenplay while his associates won the honors for best editing, photography, decoration and sound. Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” was named best foreign film.

The ceremonies took on the air of an official homecoming for Malle, who left France as a well-known director more than a decade ago to make films such as “Atlantic City” in the United States.

“I have never participated in these ceremonies before,” he said. “I foolishly left France before the start of the Cesars.” The French Academy started the annual presentations of awards in 1976.

Although Malle said the honors were acknowledging “the importance of the subject that I have treated,” he also made it clear that he believed they offered a lesson for the French film industry.

While his wife, American actress Candice Bergen, cried in the audience, Malle, in words that could perhaps be taken as a criticism of his own American period, said: “I have something to say to French directors. Cultivate your difference. Keep your Frenchness. The five works that were nominated for best film tonight were all small, personal films. Continue doing that. That is the safeguard of the French film industry.”

The awards to “Au Revoir Les Enfants” came at a time of great worry and soul-searching in the industry. France prides itself on having the second most important film industry in the Western world and a film-going public unrivaled anywhere.

But there was a sharp drop of almost 20% in attendance last year. The number of spectators declined from 163 million to 135 million. While the number of French films produced held steady at 133, American films dominated 60% of the market in 1987. Until 1986, French moviegoers had always seen more French than American films.

Television has been widely blamed. The French government doubled the number of television chains from three to six in the last two years and put four of them in private hands. One of the chains is a pay television service that offers mostly movies to subscribers. Not counting this chain, the number of movies shown on French television increased from 989 in 1976 to 1260 in 1987.

Although these statistics seemed to put most of the blame for a decline in movie attendance on television, some analysts warned that the problem probably stemmed more from quality than competition. French producers and directors needed to find their audience again.

As evidence, these analysts cited the fact that American movies had not lost attendance in 1987 and that a few French movies, such as “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” managed to attract crowds despite television and American competition.

“Au Revoir Les Enfants” was fifth in box office in the Paris area in the last 12 months while Jean-Loup Hubert’s “Le Grand Chemin,” whose stars Richard Bohringer and Anemone won the Cesars on Saturday night for best actor and best actress, was sixth. But no other French movie was in the top 10.

Malle was regarded as a distinguished French director when he left France for the United States. He was probably best known for “The Lovers,” “Murmur of the Heart,” and “Lacombe, Lucien.” “The Lovers” starred Jeanne Moreau, who is now the president of the French Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences.

He did well in the United States. After “Atlantic City” and “My Dinner With Andre,” he told a recent interviewer: “I had the impression that it was easy enough for me to make the films that I wanted in the conditions that I wanted. But then everything spoiled very quickly.”

Two box-office failures in the early 1980s, “Crackers” and “Alamo Bay,” persuaded him that it was time to come home.

“Au Revoir Les Enfants,” which won the Golden Lion Award as best movie at the Venice Film Festival in 1987, reached the movie houses of France last year at a propitious moment. There has been a growing awareness within France in the last few years of the extent of French collaboration and acceptance of Nazism during World War II, and there has been a growing willingness to see the subject treated in films and television.

The 1987 trial of former Lyon Gestapo Chief Klaus Barbie, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for “crimes against humanity” during the Nazi occupation, heightened these feelings and helped turn the film into a powerful experience for many French moviegoers.