Malle has said that this is the most personal and important film of his career, and I believe that he thinks that. I also believe that he’s wrong. If Goodbye is very personal to him, this may be because as an adult he has felt stricken by the recognition that he wasn’t stricken then, and it may involve his feelings of guilt over his own family’s safety and prosperity—everything that the film barely touches on. Malle has said of Goodbye, "I reinvented the past in the pursuit of a haunting and timeless truth." Maybe that’s why ! felt as if I were watching a faded French classic, something I dimly recalled. In pursuit of haunting and timeless truth, Malle has gone back to the anti-Nazi movies of the forties, and polished and formalized the actions until he’s turned melodrama into polite reverie.