It’s 1940, and the Nazi invasion of France is fully under
way. A mother, father, a five-year-old girl and her tiny dog are among a throng
of refugees fleeing Paris and jamming roads across the French countryside while
German planes drop bombs and strafe their path with a relentless rain of
machine gun fire. Soon the girl will be completely alone, her parents and that
beloved dog all cut down in front of her eyes. But before she even has the
chance to process what has happened (if she even can—on the most immediate
level, she believes they’re only asleep), she’s given a ride by an older
couple, one of whom cruelly flings the animal’s corpse, the only thing the girl
has been able to save of her now-devastated familiar world, into a creek. The
girl, Paulette (Brigitte Fossey), jumps off their wagon, retrieves the dog’s
body and is discovered by a young peasant boy, Michel (Georges Poujouly), who
brings her to his parents’ farm where she is taken in, cared for, and where in
Michel she discovers perhaps the first and only friend she has ever known in
her brief life.
The remarkable forthrightness and lack of sentiment that
provides the foundation of Rene Clement’s tenderly realized 1952
film Forbidden
Games extends not only to the clear-eyed way in which it represents
the horrors visited upon Paulette early on, but also to the friendship that
develops between her and Michel. The understanding these two forge will be
familiar to anyone who can reach back and remember the natural empathy which
can exist between two playmates, even ones with little or no history together.
Paulette seeks comfort and reassurance, and Michel, by far the youngest member
of the Dolle family, sees someone younger than himself for whom he can be the provider of care, guidance
and sympathetic attention, which is itself in short supply from his own mother
and father, preoccupied as they are with their family’s survival in the path of
the German insurgence.
Paulette has overheard the family discussing the disposal of
the bodies of those killed in the ongoing attack, and Michel takes it upon
himself to reluctantly, but no less matter-of-factly, explain to a sleepless
Paulette that yes, her parents have probably been deposited into a mass grave
and covered with dirt, a thought that surprisingly calms her. Now they are
safe, she seems to think as she drifts off into a night’s rest. It’s a thought
that facilitates the pattern of denial she’s already established, carrying her
past the actual confrontation of her parents’ absence and what it really means.
In the morning she has retrieved the stiffening corpse of her dog, determined
to at least provide the same degree of comfort and safety for him.
With Michel’s help, she buries the dog in the bowels of an
abandoned mill, under the watchful eye of an observant owl Michel claims to be
at least a hundred years old. But she worries that her dog, without the sort of
company her parents can provide each other in death, will be lonely in his
grave. So the two friends begin burying all the dead animals they can find—a
mole, a cat, a bird—next to the dog, creating a makeshift cemetery in the mill
which they lovingly tend and decorate, first with handmade crosses and then
with crosses they’ve begun to steal from the burial sites of the local (human) deceased.
Clement’s scenario establishes childish play as an almost
reasonable and certainly justified way for these children to reduce the scale
of the horror they find their families and themselves mired in. In fact,
subtracting that opening sequence, the only engagement Clement orchestrates
with the grim aggression of the war itself lies in the occasional thrum of a
plane passing overhead and the almost incidental sound of ever-threatening
explosions in the distance. The director, working from a screenplay adapted
from Francois Boyer’s novel Le Jeux
Iconnus by Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost and Boyer himself, brings the war
down to the scale of children, but the film’s point of view regarding it is the
furthest thing from childish. It’s a subject that would seem to lend itself to
easy sentiment and jerked tears, but Clement, fashioning a sort of poetic
realism in the wake of Italian neorealists like Rossellini and De Sica, steers clear of
exploiting the grim reality of war just as deftly and confidently as he manages
to portray the interior world of these children and their concerns with clarity
and empathy, without a tearjerker’s instincts. (Upon the film’s original
screenings at Cannes and Venice in 1952, though the film was generally lauded
and in fact won the Independent Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival, the
director was also accused by some critics of trivializing the circumstances of
war, presumably by showing it primarily through the eyes of children.)
Few films I can recall have had the courage to present the
innocence of childhood, and that innocence’s concomitant and inevitable
conclusion, in such honest terms—Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Jacques
Doillon’s Ponette (1996) come to
mind. (In an echo of Forbidden Games’ triumph,
Ponette also won awards at the Venice
Film Festival for Doillon and for its four-year-old star Victoire Thivisol, who
was awarded the same Best Actress prize Fossey had won 44 years earlier,
touching off a somewhat heated discussion of just how cognizant Thivisol may or
may not have been about the performance for which she had been honored.)
But the heartrending conclusion of Clement’s film may also
remind some viewers of another picture from a director who has traditionally
been less allergic to sentiment than the Frenchman was in his debut—Steven
Spielberg and his underrated 1987 epic Empire
of the Sun. The reunion of mother, father and child in Spielberg’s film was
remarkable (and remarkably moving) for its refusal to gussy up the moment in
cheap uplift—there was a haunted numbness in young Christian Bale’s face which
assured us, though he’d been returned to some semblance of the world he
remembered, that nothing was or would be the same. Clement’s film reverses the
circumstances that conclude Empire of the
Sun and leaves us with the image of a child becoming lost, unnoticed in the
throng of a bustling Parisian train station, in desperate pursuit of two adults
she may see as ghostly embodiments of the parents wrenched from her so early
on, one of whom shares a name with the only friend she’s ever had. “Michel!
Michel! Michel” she cries, pleading to the man and woman who can’t possibly
hear her above the noise of the crowd (and might ignore her if they did). It’s of
course also a plea to the memory of her young friend, now also absent from her
world, and with it Clement puts the finishing touch on the poetic and supremely
empathetic endeavor of thoroughly breaking our hearts.
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Forbidden Games
(1952), which won the Independent Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival and
eventually an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, has been playing sporadic
theatrical engagements throughout the year, and Rialto Pictures’ new digital
restoration of the film will play in Los Angeles at the Nuart Theater for a
one-week engagement beginning tomorrow, August 28. Check the Rialto Pictures Web site for more information on other possible upcoming
screenings as well as the movie’s future on home video.
