MUBI

From the beginning of this film, there is a heartbreaking statement about the loss of innocence in times of war as we see the sensitive little girl Paulette lose both her parents and her little dog to a Nazi air raid on the French countryside. The desperation she has in clinging to the dead dog shows how much she doesn’t want to let go of what has made her life feel precious, especially when a woman in a wagon tells her the dog is dead and then throws it into the river. When Paulette races down to retrieve the dog from a river bank, she refuses to let go of her innocence and remain in her comfort zone, until she enters the lives of the young boy Michel and his family on their isolated farm.

They are kind enough to let her into their home and their comfort, yet they cannot understand the trauma she must feel and teach her how to pray as a way of feeling better, something she had never learned before hand. Her deepest connection is with Michel, as he sympathizes with her losses, least of all for her dog, and helps her bury a hole for the dog and find another little animal to put down there with him. The obsession with death creates a macabre edge to the children as they keep finding other little dead animals, even creatures they can kill, to build a hidden cemetery where no creature will be lonely. What they do to preserve this sacred place of their own is of no concern to Michel’s parents or the neighbors, who are contending with their own hostilities towards each other. The only human death Paulette witnesses in the midst of the family is that of the oldest son Georges, for whom she helps Michel pray for.

However, when they steal the crosses off of the hearse carrying Georges’ body and leave the father Dolle angry and blaming the neighboring family, the Gouards, for the theft, it shows how little concern the kids have for adults affairs as they do for their own little games. Likewise, Dolle won’t show much care about his son’s death as he does for the missing crosses, showing how ridiculous and self-righteous a religious family is about respecting its dead but caring too much about the religious traditions that come with it. It then leads to a row between Dolle and the Gouard patriarch over the missing crosses, to which the kids will do nothing to stop this and keep their mouths shut to preserve their sacred place. The local clergyman who Michel confessed his theft to promises to keep it secret, but is then angry with Michel over trying to steal his crosses and later exposes him to the two families to break up the fight, showing how the adults’ apparent sacredness for religion and promises are blinded by their own materialism for sacred objects. The kids’ association with their secret cemetery is more passionate and child-like, yet unsettling with how they have had to kill some creatures, such as a little cockroach, to which Paulette isn’t comfortable with but Michel thinks is the only way the animals won’t be lonely in their graves.

Whatever is regarded as sacred, whether it’s the cemetery or the crosses or the funeral of Georges, is contradicted by theft, materialism, dishonesty, and apathy, making the demands of children and adults very incompatible with each other. The defiance Michel shows against his overbearing father and his blackmailing of his older sister in her affair with the Gouards’ eldest son Francis causes deeper animosity between the kids and adults. Whatever facades they hide behind to appear holier or more righteous than the other leads to chaos and dishonesty, leaving the children hurt the most when Paulette has to be taken to the Red Cross by the police and Michel is left to throw away the crosses on the animals’ graves into the river after Dolle breaks his promise to let the girl stay in exchange for the crosses. Their childish games are over and the throwing of the crosses shows the disregard for the sacred when religion is often portrayed as hypocritical and cruel. Now that the children can’t be together, Michel won’t let the adults have the crosses back, thus making the children and the adults even in what they get for all their dishonesty and animosity towards each other. When Paulette is alone at the Red Cross, nothing the nurse can offer in comfort can help her get over the tears of separation from her friend and she is left running after a man with the name Michel, crying out, leaving the film on a heartbreaking note of a child clinging to lost passions of innocence and love.

What Forbidden Games did fairly with the characters is that it didn’t let one get too attached to most of them as we see the adults and the kids losing something of value and turning antagonistic as a result, which made it hard to find a real protagonist or antagonist. The children are slightly macabre and disturbed in how they create their cemetery and don’t care about the rift it brings in the adults and the adults likewise become controlling and dishonest with the kids in return in getting back what they’ve stolen. The only one who we can really cry for the most is Paulette because she has lost everything, first her family and her dog, now Michel and his family, which leaves her alone again and desperate for something to cling to. It will likely be a difficult childhood for her, especially with the war having five years to go during the early 40s, and we won’t know how she can regain the source of innocence in her life. The more she cries and begs she arouses tears and sympathy for her plight and we can only hope she will get better.

Forbidden Games is one of the signal achievements of classic French cinema, a beautiful and unexpected film that details a child’s attempt to understand death in wartime with a ‘game’ that is equally a perversion of an adult ritual and a sublime realisation of the trancedent possibilities of it. After the documentary style realism of his first feature ‘La Bataille Du Rail’, Rene Clement employs the technique in a near fantasy setting to haunting effect, the source novel adapted by the established team of writers Aurenche and Bost, noted for their ability with literary properties.
What began as a short film was extended to feature length at the behest of Rene Clement’s mentor Jacques Tati, and the comedy in the piece it must be said is brilliantly handled and never gets it the way of the gravity of the subject. Clement wanted to cast a 9 year old girl as Paulette, opposite the 11 year old Michel, but the remarkable audition of a persisent 5 year old, Brigitte Fossey, thankfully convinced him otherwise and as a result we have one of the most astonishing juvenile performances ever committed to celluloid.

The opening title suggests a story book overtone but it quickly becomes apparent we are not viewing any fairy tale as we open on a column of refugees trudging down a country road after the fall of Paris in June 1940. The line comes under attack from German planes and in the confusion Paulette’s puppy makes a dash across the bridge, the little girl running off after him. Clement makes the point from the start, that connection and devotion to life of all sort’s means dealing with the loss of it as both the girl’s parents and her dog are killed under fire. Cradling the dog’s body Paulette is picked up by another couple, but when the woman throws the dead dog into the river Paulette runs after it once more and is seperated from the refugees. Following a horse that has strayed from the line she ends up on the small farm of the Dolle’s, a peasant family who take her in.
A son, Georges Dolle, has been injured by the stray horse but a younger son, Michel (George Poujouly) befriends Paulette and they become inseperable.

Told her parents are no longer at the bridge, but are ‘in a hole’ Paulette sets out to do the same for her dog, which she’s left out in the fields.
She is unaware of Christian teaching and shocks the devout country family with her lack of knowledge of the cross and the catechism. A Priest interupts her first attempt to inter the puppy, telling her a short prayer for the entry into paradise of her parents. She finds an abandoned water mill nearby and digs a hole for the puppy, ‘praying’ over it as she does. Michel finds her and begins to help, and as she’s concerned that her puppy will be lonely and sad he decides to populate their cemetery with other animals, even going so far as killing some to provide the bodies. The cemetery becomes their secret project and Michel attempts more elaborate and detailed graves, trying to construct suitable crosses for the purpose.

The outer environment they live in is a world of adults, feuding with their neighbours the Gouard’s. M Dolle (Lucien Hubert) and M Gouard (Andre Wasley) are concerned with the petty rivalry’s of unimportant and impotent men. Paulette and Michel see the hypocrisy and the barriers that prevent true connection even though one of Dolle’s daughters is coupling with the deserter son of Gouard, Francis. Georges succumbs to his injury and the family bury him, providing counterpoint to the children’s ‘games’, bit in the procession M Dolle notices crosses on the hearse are missing and he suspects Gouard. The funeral mass is pure visual poetry and the cinematography of Robert Julliard is both sympathetic and striking. Paulette spends the time in mass eyeing off the elaborate crosses on the altar and encouraging Michel to imagine how they’d look in their cemetery. Michel confesses his theft of the hearse crosses and is then caught trying to steal the ornate centre piece crucifix from the church. On a moonlit night Michel and Paulette raid the church cemetery and steal 14 crosses, dropping one on the road like a noir Hansel and Gretel only to have it found the next day adding fuel to the Dolle v Gouard fued. The patriarchs slug it out in the churchyard, comically falling into a freshly dug brave before the Priest breaks the sanctity of confession by naming Michel as the thief. Paulette and Michel refuse to reveal the location of the stolen crosses, the police arrive to take paulette to an orphanage. M Dolle agress to keep Paulette if Michel gives up the location. Michel tells him but his father breaks his word and the police take Paulette away. Michel goes to the mill and destroys the cemetery. Paulette is tagged, like a corpse, at a busy Red Cross depot and upon hearing a cry of ‘Michel’ in the crowd she wanders off.

Clement has said when a film doesn’t work it’s ‘failed alchemy’, and Forbidden Games is the polar opposite of that. All of the elements combine to create a mystical and lyrical whole, quite unique in all of cinema. The near disaster of the alternate beginning and end, that would have weakened the impact significantly can be seen on the Criterion DVD edition, a much more storybook-style narrative framing with the child actor’s outside the action as modern day children reading a story of Michel and Paulette. One imagines a Hollywood version would have employed just that device.
The French have an ability to question and ponder philosophical propositions in a way Anglo-centric cultures cannot and the handling of death and the attendent existentialist meanings in this film is a prime example.The religious nature of the rituals is never overt, a more universal,humanist tone is accomplished because of the childish innocence involved. The children create a cemetery of stunning poetic purity while the adult cemetery is bleak and overgrown, or a ‘slum’ as Dolle calls it. They create a dreamscape that helps them find satisfaction and contentment as they understand it, unaware that they are creating a ‘blasphemy’. The adults accuse each other of slights and blasphemy’s, showing little regard for the significance of the context, indeed M Dolle was more concerned with fixing his hearse, a status symbol, than attending the service for his son’s burial. The Priest and the father both are untrustworty, breaking their vows to suit their own purpose, a duplicity not found in the children. Paulette and Michel achieve an unwitting trancendence, enabled by their confusion and innocence only to have it ripped away by an unfeeling and uncomprehending world, the final seperation one of the most heartbreaking imaginable.

A classic, maybe even a top 10 film for me. Un miracle de cinema, once seen, never forgotten.

After an unforgiving attack by the Nazis kills her parents and pet dog, five-year-old Paulette is left without a family or a home. A local peasant family kindly takes her in, their ten-year-old son Michel becoming both brother and friend to her. The two bury Paulette’s beloved dog in a discreet spot in the woods, and soon become fascinated by dead animals. As their macabre interest grows, they collect corpses of animals to bury in a rudimentary cemetery, but when Michel steals crosses from the village’s graveyard, including that of his own deceased brother, the local adults decide to put a stop to these ‘forbidden games’. Worse still is the overhanging threat of the police, keen to take custody of the newly orphaned Paulette.

Despite its themes, Forbidden Games is careful not to overwhelm with morbidity – director René Clément remembers to celebrate life as an element of meditation on death. The protagonists, skilfully portrayed by young actors Brigitte Fossey and Georges Poujoly, behave as any bereaving child would. In a particularly provocative sequence towards the end, Michel discards all of the graveyard’s crosses, his anger justified and pure. The children’s explorations of their decaying environment are extraordinarily well shot – the camera becomes another child, free of judgment or authority. Forbidden Games is a charming, honest exploration of how the machinations of death affect children not readily equipped with the emotions to handle it, and still holds its own alongside similar features such as Ponette and The Spirit of the Beehive.

From Celluloid Breakfast

A beautiful and tender film about the impact of loss, and displaced emotion. A brutal world where children find escape through little ceremonies that are perpetually violated by insensitive adults. Uniquely told through contrasts in such subtle ways that it made the devices flow through the 86 minutes as though there was no manipulation, and everything was just left to its nature. This left me with all of its weight, and soul mangling impact AFTER viewing, which I found to be a wonderful effect. A rare breed of movie, and a solid lasting classic.

The opening sequence is very good. A little girl from the city is thrown into tragic circumstances. She befriends a boy a few years older than she is and is temporarily adopted by his farming family. There are funny moments dealing with the family’s rivalry with the neighboring family, and with relationships within the Dolle family household. It is interesting how the children try to cope with the tragedy of war, but I was not overly impressed by the five year old actress. Her acting method did not seem particularly natural. What I mean is, you can tell the director was coaching her to bring the tears on at certain moments, instead of her being able to react naturally to the situations.