Jeux interdits

I am really drawn to art that makes clean choices about messy things in order to deliver the richness of the mess cleanly.

Its a complicated set of tradeoffs, part abstracting things away, part enriching or amplifying things. Cinema is different than any other art because nominally we presume we are seeing reality. The people and things we see are real and the situations seem real.

But what we actually get is refined. There are two pleasures to such projects. One is the inhaling of the world we are presented with, then living with it as it commingles with our blood. The other is a sort of external appreciation of what choices were made, how expertly the arrows were made, and what craft there was in how we were tracked and captured.

This is a wonderful film in both respects and likely will stay with you dually for the rest of your life. Clean and messy.

One of the messes is accidental, as is probably true in most real art. The story is truncated abruptly because funding was. If you didn't know that, you might be amazed at how adroitly this storyteller dropped the narrative to keep us in the story once it has ended. And you might marvel at how appropriate that is, given the girl's own loss of story.

The nominal threads are about losses and the superficialities of religion to cover them. This is wrapped in an evocation of dear childhood, innocence, deep bonds, impulsive large projects. And of course, adults who have no idea of the real world nor appreciation for the bonds to it. We can get all this because the ordinary skills (acting, writing, staging) are performed so well that they get out of the way.

(However, along the way we become aware that the filmmaker murders a finally twitching puppy before our eyes.)

I'd like to highlight the external view, the one that looks as what is refined and what leavened. Simplified in story thread and child's perspective. Enriched in emotion, engagement and unexpected shape. Its sweet and dark both. Its emotionally casual and deeply affecting both. Its both distinctly French and universal, something that is rare in my experience. Bresson can't touch this.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

A classic French foreign film, one of the best. A necessity for every foreign film lover's video library, along with Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful. This film haunts you and stays with you long after the film flashes its "finis". Part of this is due to the musical soundtrack, with its romantic guitar melodies, part of it has to do with the sadness of the storyline....the little girl's losing her parents and beloved dog early in the picture, but mostly the film lingers in your heart because of the outstanding performances by the child actors in this film, Georges Poujouly who plays Michel, and especially Brigitte Fossey as Paulette. Her little innocent face expresses all the horrors and trauma of war, what all the millions of children must have felt who were caught up in the barbarism of World War Two, when the security of a loving home was pulled out from under them. Never has the agony of a human being's suffering been so well captured on film, and I think Brigitte was all of six years old when she performed in this movie. A remarkable feat.

I don't know why I never managed to see "Les Jeux interdits" until tonight, an August evening in 2003, more than a half-century after the film's release. I'd heard about it ever since I started studying French in college in 1958.

The amount of comedy in the film surprised and pleased me. I'd always had the impression the film was morbid and creepy. I didn't find it so; poignant, occasionally disturbing, even heart-wrenching, but not morbid at all. The acting by the two children playing Michel and Paulette is the most amazing pair of performances I've ever seen. I learned from postings here that the film was made under far less than optimal conditions, but the flaws that do show up in the film, chief among them the abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, are so negligible in contrast to the overwhelming emotional and acting values throughout, that I rated this film a ten, the first time I've reached for the highest number.

I cannot imagine anything finer than this film, whose images will probably haunt me for the rest of my life.

Never has the world of adults seemed so utterly stupid, brutal and senseless than through the eyes of two innocent children who have to deal with pain, loss, death and war. And yet, the film is gentle, subtle, inobtrusive in its portrayal of the grown-up's follies, and refreshingly unsentimental about presenting the pain and beauty of childhood.

A masterpiece.

Few other titles come to mind in which child actors have so much to bear, and they manage it effortlessly & unforgettably.

[The only thing that bothers me is the too convincing 'acting' of the dead /?/ dog...]

I am incapable of writing reams about films I admire because words do no justice to the magic they conjure.

FORBIDDEN GAMES left me speechless when I first saw it two decades ago.

It is ABOUT two French children, a peasant boy, a Parisian girl, who become close friends as World War 2 ravages Europe.

The film LOOKS at the way warfare effects the innocent and transforms one's view of death.

Director Rene Clement sets the story in a rural village and peoples his story with some of the most authentic characters ever to tred the silver screen. He employs humour, horror and humanism to tell his story and solicits an incredible performance from moppet Brigitte Fossey.

It's a tearjerker, too, it's emotionally delicate, and it's perfectly manipulated drama -- all good drama is.

Its power is its apparent simplicity.

A love letter to cinema that is also one of the greatest and most haunting war movies ever made.

The imagery and the heart-rending music score will remain with you forever.