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.

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 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.

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.

The first thing to bear in mind is that "Jeux interdits" was first a short ,part of a film made up of sketches -two others were to be made.For financial reasons,they were eventually jettisoned ,and "jeux interdits" had to be fleshed out to the proportions of a feature-length film.So additional scenes were shot more than one year after the first ones...and of course the children had grown up! Clement and his team had to make wonders to hide that.And they outdid themselves so brilliantly that nobody saw their "effects".

Now for the ending:Clement wanted a prologue and an epilogue:Fossey and Poujouly would read a book which told the tale of two children (Paulette and Michel).Those short sequences were eventually withdrawn,which explains this unexpected ending which still baffles the audience today.

As for the movie,needless to say it's one of the most important works of the French cinema.Some users did comment it so well I won't add anything except for Brigitte Fossey's performance,which will remain the most powerful one for such a young child.It was not surprising that Fossey enjoyed a brilliant career when she grew up...even if she never found a part so striking afterward.