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The French director Louis Malle is a hard one to pigeonhole. He doesn't have an over-arching style or a few themes to which he returns over and over again. He doesn't even specialize in particular genres, like Hitchcock and thrillers or Ozu and family dramas. Instead, his body of work, stretching over 40 years, is wildly diverse, careening from slapstick farce (Zazie in the Subway, 1960) to documentary (Calcutta, 1969) to sexual transgression (Murmur of the Heart, 1971) to crime drama (Atlantic City, 1980). For many film critics, this diversity is a liability. We've been so influenced by the auteurist theories of the '60s that we automatically assume any director who changes that much must not be worth our time. Give us the rigor of Welles or Godard, where we can pore over the little details and discuss how their styles developed over the decades. When confronted with the over 30 films in Malle's oeuvre, we turn away to a director who's easier to classify.

This is a shame. I'm not going to make any grand claims that Louis Malle is one of the most important directors of the last fifty years, as I haven't seen anywhere near all of his films. But that's part of the problem. I haven't had a chance to see enough of his work to even form an opinion. Until now. In honor of the 10th anniversary of Malle's death, Facets Cinematheque has launched an almost complete retrospective. It kicked off two weekends ago with The Lovers, the 1958 film that was initially banned in parts of America and precipitated the famous Supreme Court decision on pornography ("I know it when I see it"). The retro will continue through December 18 and cover 25 feature films, many of which aren't available on either VHS or DVD.

Malle's final film was actually the first one I saw. Vanya on 42nd Street (screening at Facets on Dec. 11) is an updated version of Chekhov's play, with Wallace Shawn in the title role. The play had been famously performed in improvised settings around New York when director Andre Gregory asked Malle to film it. The result is a delightful, if talky, stage play with Vanya ruing his fate and consistently interrupting and being interrupted by various relatives and friends. An early performance by Julianne Moore was a sign of great things to come.

That wasn't the first collaboration of Shawn, Gregory, and Malle. The three had joined together a dozen years before to make the off-beat My Dinner with Andre (Nov. 25). It's simply a conversation between the idiosyncratic Shawn and the philosophical Gregory, as they discuss art, dreams, and the meaning of life. As with many of Malle's films, Dinner is both specific and universal. Shawn and Gregory are long-standing members of New York's intellectual elite, and it shows. But their concerns are not that much different from your typical everyman, and the thrill of watching their debate/conversation is in imagining how you'd respond to their verbal repartee and which side you'd take up.

Malle's most famous film might also be his best. Au Revoir Les Enfants (Dec. 17) is an auto-biographical tale set in World War II. A boy on the cusp of adolescence in January 1944 is sent to a Catholic boarding school to escape the Allied bombing of Paris. There, he befriends another boy named Bonnet who mysteriously appears at the school one day. Even those who haven't seen the multitude of WWII/Holocaust films will quickly realize that Bonnet is Jewish and in hiding. It takes our hero a while to figure that out, though; and when he does, he's not sure what to do about it. This story was a familiar one even in 1987 when it was made; I was surprised to see how closely this echoed Claude Berri's 1967 The Two of Us, which screened at the Music Box earlier this year. But Malle does something terrific with the material. He concentrates on the details of the boys' lives: what it was like in 1944, what boarding schools are like, what it's like to make friends, what it's like to be alone. And 
in the accumulation of those details, he constructs a story that's both resonant and powerful.

As I read about Malle in the past couple weeks, I was surprised to see Jonathan Rosenbaum describe him as an upper-class misanthrope. Malle was certainly upper-class, but his films (again, the ones I've seen) are deeply critical of the rich. In one of Au Revoir's most potent scenes, a priest whom we're supposed to admire preaches a pointed and caustic homily on the dangers of money and the need for those who have to share with those who don't. The auto-biographical protagonist is taken to task for his selfishness, and his parents are portrayed as self-absorbed and out of touch because of their wealth. Vanya on 42nd Street also focuses on the upper crust but in a way that highlights the loneliness and frustrations that cut across class distinctions and touch the human condition.

Maybe this is where Rosenbaum's misanthrope accusation comes from, but if acknowledging that people are flawed and often unhappy makes one a misanthrope, then I (and many others, I suspect) deserve the same label. I'd argue, rather, that Malle's films embody the humanist ideal, that he captures the essence of growing up (Au Revoir), growing wise (Dinner) and growing old (Vanya) and that he grasps the tenuous beauty of life. The final scene of Au Revoir, as Malle focuses on an empty door and then cuts to his protagonist with tears in his eyes, is a haunting reminder of how much is lost when someone leaves this world.

The retrospective's schedule can be found on Facets' website: www.facets.org. I've heard particularly good things about Malle's documentaries, Phantom India (Nov. 26 & 27) and God's Country (Dec. 18). And you don't want to miss one of Burt Lancaster's last great performances in Atlantic City (Nov. 28).

J. Robert Parks