Forbidden Games (1952)

The beginning of Forbidden Games is so horrifying that the viewer can be forgiven for thinking that the rest of the film is a pleasant stroll through the process of children playing at war and figuring out the power of death. German planes dip out of the sky, their wailing engines scattering Parisian refugees; bombs drop on them and machine-gun bullets spray the narrow bridge the French civilians must cross. Like a lost scene out of Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence, young Paulette’s parents and her puppy are caught in the crossfire and die, leaving her to run away away into the countryside only to be found by Michel Dollé, a boy who takes her home to his family’s farm, untouched by the war. The worst of the Dollé’s concerns involves the petty squabbles they have with the neighboring family.

Every review I’ve looked at for Forbidden Games acclaims Bridget Fossey’s performance as Paulette as one of the great all-time child performances (I think hers is an all time great performance, period) but this shrifts Georges Poujouly as Michel. The film works so well because he plays the young boy in love with a rather tyrannical girl, always trying to acquiesce to her demands, failing, then trying harder the next time. His family treats her like a doll, carrying her to and fro throughout the home in their arms, but Michel is the one who validates her feelings of loss and gives her the genuine affection that the tragedy of losing her parents denied her. She becomes obsessed by the idea of building a graveyard for her puppy, then for all the other dead animals they can find. Michel happily begins killing chicks and stealing crosses to build her monument in an abandoned farm.

The rest of the characters play at their beliefs, but don’t rely on them every day, as contrasted with the fervor in which Paulette and Michel go about their cemetery work. The family goes to church but ends up in a fight with their rival neighboring family over the top and inside of a freshly dug grave in a sequence straight out of The Three Stooges but whose implications are far darker than any light slapstick. The family is indifferent to Paulette and Michel’s mission, dismissing it as naughty children’s behavior and refusing to see how important creating the cemetery was to them. Slighting the children in this way leads to the bone-chilling finale where the family feels it has done its civic duty and ignores the real emotional needs of Paulette for their own pastoral ease.

Forbidden Games features remarkable performance from Fossey and Poujouly, and the film plays with different genres (war documentary, fantasy, morality play) in a cohesive whole that will stir the depths of the viewer’s horror and sympathy.