Paulette is a six-year-old blond girl who, with her parents and her little dog, are part of a stream of refugees fleeing the advancing Germans early in World War II. The crowd is bombed and strafed and Paulette wanders off, an orphan, with her dead dog in her arms.
She is taken in by a family of farmers with rather rudimentary values. They're plain spoken sons of the soil and they give her a bed (over the protests of one of the sons whose blankets are being appropriated) and treat her casually as one of the family.
Paulette befriends Michel, the son who is a few years older than she. He suggests they bury her dog, already in rigor. But why?, asks Paulette. Well, it keeps him out of the rain. But won't he be lonely? Well, we'll get him some company. And they begin collecting small dead animals and burying them in the secret animal cemetery they've created. But they need crosses to put on the graves. Why? Well, that's the way it's done. So they begin stealing crosses from all over the place -- including the church and the cemetery. This leads to an uproar which is resolved by the police, who show up and politely take Paulette off to an orphanage. But all Paulette wants is to return to Michel.
It may sound like a tear jerker but it's rather more than that. Paulette knows nothing of death, and Michel hardly more. He mistakes the rituals -- the prayers, the icons, the graves -- for the thing behind the rituals.
For that matter, the adults seem to miss the point as well. One of the older sons has been run over by a horse-drawn cart and it takes him several days to die in his bed. He's not ignored. Michel reads the newspaper to him. But his condition and his future are treated casually, as if it were an everyday, humdrum events. "Look, he's spitting up blood now. We'll have to wash the sheets." The father misses the funeral mass because he's distracted by a loose board in the floor of the hearse and is busy fixing it outside the door.
And when the crosses begin to disappear, the father accuses a neighboring family of stealing them and a comic fist fight follows. In the middle of the most brutal war in human history, a war in which tens of millions will be slaughtered, two simple-minded men are battling each other over mutual accusations which are both trivial and false.
I'm not certain about the end. I don't really know that Paulette has learned very much about death, it's moral significance or its utter permanence. And I don't know that Michel's view of the world is any more sophisticated. But the incongruity between these petty gripes and insect deaths on the one hand and the historical reality of their situation holds the film together.
The dead little dog aside, it's a moving film.
She is taken in by a family of farmers with rather rudimentary values. They're plain spoken sons of the soil and they give her a bed (over the protests of one of the sons whose blankets are being appropriated) and treat her casually as one of the family.
Paulette befriends Michel, the son who is a few years older than she. He suggests they bury her dog, already in rigor. But why?, asks Paulette. Well, it keeps him out of the rain. But won't he be lonely? Well, we'll get him some company. And they begin collecting small dead animals and burying them in the secret animal cemetery they've created. But they need crosses to put on the graves. Why? Well, that's the way it's done. So they begin stealing crosses from all over the place -- including the church and the cemetery. This leads to an uproar which is resolved by the police, who show up and politely take Paulette off to an orphanage. But all Paulette wants is to return to Michel.
It may sound like a tear jerker but it's rather more than that. Paulette knows nothing of death, and Michel hardly more. He mistakes the rituals -- the prayers, the icons, the graves -- for the thing behind the rituals.
For that matter, the adults seem to miss the point as well. One of the older sons has been run over by a horse-drawn cart and it takes him several days to die in his bed. He's not ignored. Michel reads the newspaper to him. But his condition and his future are treated casually, as if it were an everyday, humdrum events. "Look, he's spitting up blood now. We'll have to wash the sheets." The father misses the funeral mass because he's distracted by a loose board in the floor of the hearse and is busy fixing it outside the door.
And when the crosses begin to disappear, the father accuses a neighboring family of stealing them and a comic fist fight follows. In the middle of the most brutal war in human history, a war in which tens of millions will be slaughtered, two simple-minded men are battling each other over mutual accusations which are both trivial and false.
I'm not certain about the end. I don't really know that Paulette has learned very much about death, it's moral significance or its utter permanence. And I don't know that Michel's view of the world is any more sophisticated. But the incongruity between these petty gripes and insect deaths on the one hand and the historical reality of their situation holds the film together.
The dead little dog aside, it's a moving film.