Jeux interdits

Wonderfully wry, ribald, and ironic look at children, life, and death in the provinces. This must be one of the best examples of poetic realism – much better than any Renoir you'll see – it's alive and humane, comprising a hundred little iconic cinema moments and several major ones.

A little girl, whose parents are killed in an air-raid at the beginning, wanders into a nearby farm clutching her dead dog and is taken in. She becomes attached to the boy at the farm and they start to expand her dog's grave into a little cemetery of dead animals. There's nothing macabre or sinister about this, nor (as the blurbs maintain) is it particularly a statement about the effect of war on children - it's simply the sort of thing kids might do. When they start pinching crosses from the real cemetery though, they are in for it.

The peasant family are a hoot. The father has a hilarious running feud with his neighbour; the daughter is having an illicit affair with the neighbour's son; the elder son succumbs to a tragi-comic demise after an innocuous accident; the second is a good-natured hick; and the youngest boy gets clouted by his father at every turn ("Take that!", says the father as he smacks him across the head – "...and that!" says his sister as she plonks some flowers into his hand). Their every movement is bursting with rough humour and vitality and we are being shown something interesting in every frame. It comes vividly to life, and as an evocation of childhood is up there with Selznick's Tom Sawyer and "Spirit of the Beehive".

Remarkable performances from the two children. There's no sanctimoniousness or even self-awareness to it; Clement got it down and it came out right.

This great film has been well-described here and elsewhere, and I don't know that there's a lot more to be said about its worth. It made a great impression on me when I first saw it in an English-dubbed version on late night TV many years ago, and it has always been a favorite of mine since then.

But it seems there's often a bit more to learn about an old favorite film. In this case, I acquired a foreign DVD edition of "Les Jeux interdits" which contained, besides some interesting outtakes, a later-deleted prologue and epilogue to the film which I had never heard of before. These did not have English subtitles, so I had to guess what was being said, but Clement's direction and the acting of young Fossey and Poujouly are so good that I could follow almost all of it without knowing very much French at all. They establish a sort of framing device for the story, in that the plot of the film is in fact a story from a book being read by the boy to the girl. In the prologue we see Fossey and Poujouly, not dressed in grimy peasant clothes at all, but clean, scrubbed, and in their Sunday-best, sitting on a log over a stream. The boy begins reading the story of Paulette and Michel out of the book, and we fade into the film as we now know it, beginning with the refugees on the road. After the sad ending of the story, we fade back to the epilogue, where the boy has just finished reading. The heartbreaking ending of the story has the girl in tears of despair. So the boy, in an act of kindness to her, pretends to read a blank page at the end of the book and makes up a happy ending to the story to dispel her grief.

I guess I can see why it might have been deleted later, as it tends to soften the force of the central narrative a bit and the devastating sadness of its ending. But it really is a beautiful and touching bit of film, and I'm very happy to have a chance to see it, as I don't think it's been seen much over the years, or that many fans of this film are even aware of it.

The outtakes are quite interesting as well, as they show some alternate takes of familiar scenes, including the snapping of that little blackboard thing with the title of the film at the start of the shots (what's that thing called, anyway?). There is also some footage of the old owl in the rafters of the mill, in which you can occasionally see Clement coming into the frame to turn the owl's head around toward the camera when it keeps turning away.

With or without the missing prologue and epilogue – this is a great masterpiece that you should experience.

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.

This is very nearly a perfect film. There have been many films about children, but few are strong enough to allow for innocence and honesty to co-exist. Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games) makes no such compromises. Hollywood would have traded a happy (and phony) ending for poignancy. Beautiful cinematography.

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.