User Reviews

This is Rene Clement's most celebrated and arguably best film despite being only the fifth film of his I have watched; for the record, I also have CHE GIOIA VIVERE (1960) on VHS and IS Paris BURNING? (1966) on DVD and would certainly like to catch up with a few others, especially LES MAUDITS (1947), GERVAISE (1956) and AND HOPE TO DIE (1972).

Apparently, FORBIDDEN GAMES only became a feature film after Jacques Tati's encouragement and, if so, one needs to be grateful to him as the film is one of the most poignant (and controversial) depictions of childhood innocence on film and its influence is evident in later similarly-themed films like Philip Leacock's INNOCENT SINNERS (1958). Clement opens his film with a harrowing and totally realistic air-raid sequence but proceeds with a charming and humorous depiction of simple farm life which revolves around the household, church and cemetery; the latter two settings, in fact, host two of the film's most entertaining sequences. Of course, the paradox of the children's love for animals and the need to populate their secret cemetery (and utilizing stolen crosses no less) is only the direct result of the children's impossibility of grasping the world around them: the children's cruelty to animals (the boy's stabbing of a cockroach with a pen, for example) is just as sensible to him as the barrage of bombs which the "civilized" adults throw at each other day in day out.

The remarkable performances by the two young children (Brigitte Fossey and Georges Poujouly) are certainly among the finest of their kind but the film also takes care to offer eccentric characters for its relatively unknown ensemble cast to sink their teeth in, including an early role for familiar character actor Jacques Marin as the ill-fated Georges, whose untimely death has a pivotal bearing on the film's plot. To top it all, FORBIDDEN GAMES is blessed by a haunting guitar score by Narciso Yepes.

Forbidden Games deals with the reaction of a couple of children –Paullette, who losses both her parents as the consequence of an air attack, and Michel, the youngest of a peasant family in which Paullete finds refuge- in the context of the horrors of war, in this case, the second world war, in 1940.

The movie (unlike others dealing with children and war, like "Germany, Year Zero") does not portray a miserable and deadly environment. Certainly, war is sensed all the time, and the danger of falling bombs is ever present. However, the movie is set in the seemingly peaceful countryside, not among ruins and combats. That doesn't diminish the tragic context of the movie at all. Because we have witnessed what Paullette has gone through. And although Michel doesn't seem to have had any kind of traumatic loss, he's old enough to know what's going on, and what Paullette is suffering. Maybe, this explains the way Michel wants to please Paullette, in her way to direct her pain. Their game of stealing crosses to complete a "big" animal cemetery could be seen as a morbid and macabre play by children spoiled by the war, transformed into monsters. However, we never question the innocence that remains in the main characters as children that they are: what's macabre is not what they do, it's the war that they are witnessing. They just channel the influence of war and its implicit dead without malice.

Whether this topic is analyzed as the simplicity of an ill influenced child's play, or through any psychological or mental connotations or meanings that could be applied, Forbidden Games is still, even today, a very original piece of cinema, that would hardly reach the same meaning if it's filmed today, without the context and recent history that influenced it back in 1952. Anyway, nowadays, any director that would try to make a movie like this would find himself being very cautious, and I think he would end up doing something too tragic or too simplistic. René Clement did the right thing with the material that was handed to him, and the story and its meaning is so powerful and well executed that can still be enjoyed today. And what seems to be an open ending, is useful to reminds us that in war, for children there are no happy ending stories.

Unlike what one might think about a movie made in 1952 and with children as the lead actors, acting is flawless. I said that we never question the innocence of the children, and that is due in great part to the looks and great work of Briggitte Fossey and Georges Poujoly, whom give great credibility to that premise.

Criterion Collection has made available this magnificent movie on DVD for the first time. As usual, it's a commendable work of restoration in many senses: in the sense of allowing more people –like me- to get to know this movie, and in the sense of giving it the best quality that the latest techniques allow.

The original French soundtrack is included, along with the English dubbed, both of them monophonic. Of course, English subtitles are included.

As Bonus materials we have alternate opening and ending, that would have given the movie a different context, less realistic, if you will. But I cannot help but think that they would have given the story some more contrasting connotations. Also, there are interviews with the director alone and him with Briggitte Fossey (both from the 60's) and an interview with the actress in 2.001.

Unlike some other Criterion releases, there is no additional track with an expert shedding some light on aspects that might be of interest, but a little printed essay is included in a booklet.

My only complaint here is that in IMDb this movie has a relative low qualification, and few votes. I hope that the availability of the new Criterion release will change things in the near future.

The film tells the story of young Paulette and Michel. It takes place in the french countryside during the war. Paulette's parents are killed and she wanders into the lives of Michel and his family. The Forbidden Games in the title refers to Paulette and Michel's concept of religion in order to come deal with death They steal crosses around the village and create a cemetery for Paulette's dead dog and other village animals. You feel so much love between the older Michel to Paulette. When the end comes and officials have to take Paulette away, the sadness one feels is so intense. Looking at Michel, his feeling of sadness and betrayal and watching Paulette deal with her loneliness and fear, and having the movie end on such a sad and abrupt note seemed right to me. This is truly a great motion picture.

French filmmakers just seem to have such great instincts when it comes to making films about children. This classic film started the wave of fine films about children, which includes many of Truffaut's films such as The 400 blows and Small Change,..also Ponette, La Vie en Rose, the Dardennes' La Promesse, Le Fils, and Rosetta, Sundays with Cybele, Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart and Au revoir les Enfants, and a great recent documentary, To be and To Have. The children in these films and in countless other french films are treated as human beings, not cute cuddly creatures. We follow these children through their lives and it gives us hope for our own children, we realize that they have such a deep capacity themselves to feel, to think, to learn, to suffer, to love... When I see most of the movies coming out of Hollywood about children, and I see the commercialization of it all and then see how many of our kids turn out, I say.....well what did you expect.

Francois Truffaut once said that you should not make films about children because you want to understand them better, no, it should simply be because you love them. We feel Clement's love in this film.

In French the title of this movie is perhaps appropriate, but in English it is misleading. What is "forbidden" about the games that the children play has nothing to do with sex (the usual designation of "forbidden" in English). Instead what 11-year-old Michel Dolle (Georges Poujouly) and 5-year-old Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) do that is forbidden is they steal crosses, from the cemetery, from the top of a horse-drawn hearse--Michel even attempts to steal the rector's crucifix. They do this as a way of coping with death. The crosses are for dead animals, her dog, some chicks, a worm, etc. that they have buried in a little plot under the mill near a stream.

But this is not a horror show or anything like it. Instead, René Clément's celebrated tale of childhood love is actually a strongly religious anti-war movie of incredible delicacy, laced with humor and poignancy.

It begins with an air attack on a stream of people (presumably Parisians running from Paris) along a country road trying to escape the encroachment of the Nazi army. Little Paulette is in a car with her parents and her little dog, Jock. They are gunned down by a German fighter plane. Paulette's parents and the dog are killed. Paulette is left alone carrying the dead dog in her arms. Eventually she wanders onto a farm where she is met by Michel who takes an instant liking to her and becomes her protector and her friend. His is a peasant family of farmers who really don't need another mouth to feed, but they take her in. She is so clean, they exclaim and she smells so good. She is from Paris. She has just undergone the most horrible terror, the death of her parents and her dog, and now she must somehow come to grips with that loss. What transpires is a child's interpretation of the healing power of religious ritual and symbol.

Clément uses the world of the children as a counterpoint to the war in the background and as a gentle satire on the church. The children make a game of religion and in doing so demonstrate the healing power of ritual and sacrament.

What makes this totally original and deeply symbolic film work is the uncluttered and naturalistic vision of Clément and his wonderful direction of his two little stars. Fossey in particular is amazing. She is completely unaffected and natural, an adorable little girl suddenly alone in the world who must make a new world for herself against great odds. Her sense of personal integrity and her strong will makes us believe that somehow she will succeed. Incidentally, Fossey's performance here in conveying the creative world of the child should be compared with 4-year-old Victoire Thivisol's performance in Jacques Doillon's Ponette (1996), as should the skill and vision of the directors. Both are deeply religious films that rely on the pre-socialized world of the child to show us our own spirituality.

Also very good is Poujouly as the farm boy who loves little Paulette and shows that love by assuming the psychological and spiritual responsibility for helping her to overcome the tragedy of being so brutally orphaned. He is himself experiencing a pre-adolescent coming of age, a transition exemplified by rebellion and a growing independence of mind and spirit. Poujouly is intense and fully engaged, so much so that in one scene we can see him mouth in unison Paulette's lines in preparation for his time to speak. Clément left this in perhaps because he knew it would further characterize Michel's intensity.

This film won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1952 and an Academy Award the same year as best foreign film. It is one of the wonders of the French cinema, a masterpiece of the human spirit not to be missed. See it for the children, whose strength of character can inspire us all.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

Rene Clement's Jeux Interdits opens with, perhaps, the most harrowing depiction of war committed to celluloid. A multitude of Parisians file down a dusty country road, while the Luftwaffe circles above. Bombs drop; machine guns blaze. At the end of it, a little girl is orphaned; moreover, she's crushed her beloved dog Jock in an attempt to escape the machine gun fire that took down her parents. Not shocked and not necessarily sad, the girl carries the limp puppy onward (she does not know he is dead) until an elderly couple picks her up and tosses the lifeless canine into a nearby river. It's a completely devastating way to spend ten minutes.

The remaining film, in which the little girl, Paulette, comes to live with the rustic Dolles and cause their young son Michel to become totally smitten, is now less emotionally charged (though it does lack a certain visceral, gut-punching quality inherent in the film's beginning). Jeux Interdits explores death through the eyes of children who either do not understand or only partly understand the concept. The mysteriousness of mortality has never been more touchingly portrayed, and I can think of few other films that dwell so single-mindedly on this theme. There probably do not need to be more films like this, as, when you hit the perfect note on your first attempt, there's no need for another try.

Additionally, childhood has rarely been captured so accurately (the apparent callous innocence of these children is pitch perfect and recalls to mind the axiom, "forgive them, they know not what they do). The youths in this film are not idealized: Paulette is selfish and finicky, but that is not a character fault--she's simply young--and Michel, eager to please her, commits acts at which the audience frowns but which the audience understands. Though innocents, these children are anything but idealized and that's immensely important to a film that deals with so much death.

Beyond thematics, the acting, especially by the kids, is uniformly excellent and adds to the touching humanism of the film. The cinematography and framing is also wonderful. It's subtle, but Clement arranges his actors within the frame in a masterful and painterly way. Watching the film I paused it several times to simply enjoy the tableau.

All in all, Jeux Interdits is an amazing achievement and, I think, should be more highly regarded (or it should simply be regarded by a wider audience). It ranks among the best in French film--among the 400 Blows, the Grand Illusions, the Breathlesses. It's a remarkable movie, which you should watch immediately.

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.

"Forbidden Games", Rene Clement's masterpiece, is a magnificent document about the absurdity of war. This anti-war film has given a lot of pleasure to audiences since its release. The film juxtaposes the madness of the conflict during WWII to the innocence of a child who is caught in its web of death and destruction.

We are taken to the French countryside as people are leaving the madness behind in search of safer havens where the war would spare them of the tragedy the country was living during those days. Paulette, a girl who is fleeing with her parents has only one thing in mind, to stay with her beloved dog. As her pet gets loose, she runs across a bridge to rescue him when German aircraft strike killing her parents and her precious dog.

Paulette wanders deep in the country and is discovered by Michel Dolle, a farm boy a bit older than Paulette. These two will bond with one another in ways that only innocent children would. Michel feels protective of this orphan girl. The Dolle family are poor peasants that are eking a life out of their land during difficult times. They have quarreled with their neighbors, the Gouards. The Dolles accept gladly the stray girl who obviously comes from a different world than theirs.

The little girl, who wants to bury her dog, suddenly discovers death all around her. She finds in Michel a friend and an ally who will prove he is a true friend until the end. Michel, in turn, sees an opportunity to show Paulette his knowledge in the ways of the farm. When Michel's brother Georges die, both he and Paulette come face to face with a new reality they can't comprehend. Suddenly, their games take a new turn.

The little girl's fascination with crosses and tombs come to a head as they go to the village's cemetery to bury Georges. In the graveyard Paulette finds a treasure trove of the beloved objects all over the place and she and Michel must have them to mark the tombs of their dead animals, something a child's mind could ever conceive. The local priest and the two families are shocked by the discovery, when after all, in Paulette's mind it was a new kind of game in her new surroundings.

Rene Clement made an excellent job in this classic that will stay one of the most beloved pieces of film making of all times. Mr. Clement was extremely lucky in finding the luminous Brigitte Fossey to bring to life Paulette. Pairing this young non professional with Georges Poujouly, proved to be the right combination as the two children blend seamlessly together, complimenting each other throughout the picture. Brigitte Fossey, who was about five years old when the shooting took place, gives a performance that perhaps no other professional child actor has ever equaled.

The Criterion DVD transfer we watched shows how wonderfully they have preserved this film for future generations to enjoy.

Yet another truly outstanding French film about childhood and featuring a performance by a child to rival that in Poil de Carrotte. The brilliant script is the work of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, shortly to be savagely pilloried by the inferior Francois Truffaut. Rene Clement's sure hand behind the camera keeps a fine stew - elements of a Hatfield/McCoy peasant feud blend seamlessly with drama, pathos and satire - simmering perfectly in the story of a five year old girl who, whilst fleeing with her parents and hundreds of others from the Paris of 1940 is orphaned dramatically when her parents are strafed as she lies in their arms. The same fate befalls her dog and Clement does not shun from realism as another traveller, noting the dog's condition, brutally snatches it from the child and hurls it unceremoniously into a river. Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) retrieves the dog and eventually takes up with Michele (Georges Poujouley) a couple of years older who in turn takes her to his peasant family amongst whom she stands out like a sore thumb. Together the two children create what can only be describes (long before Stephen King even came on the scene) a pet cemetery in a local mill, beginning with the dog which is supplemented by the odd chicken, worm, etc and for which they steal real crosses inadvertently aggravating a long-standing feud. This is a film that has it all, laughter, tears and everything in between and cannot be praised too highly and will be around long after Truffaut's ouevre has been turned into banjo pics.

Several times I went right past this video when I was searching the shelves of our local library. Why? Well, with a title like "forbidden games" it sounded like a porno movie! However, this was actually a kind of sweet movie about two children--one of whom was orphaned at the beginning of the movie as her family is running from the Nazis in mid-1940. The script was generally very good as were the actors. I guess the only problem I had was that WHAT the kids did in the movie regarding crosses was so far-fetched! It just didn't seem at all likely behavior from ANY kids I've ever seen! When it was released, this movie got a lot of acclaim. In fact, it received the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. I truly doubt if it would receive such an honor today, as the movie just seemed a little dated and not particularly special. Perhaps in 1952 it was.

Forbidden Games tackles and interesting and challenging premise: children in a war encountering death. The film manages to create some interesting moments, such as when little Paulette's parents are killed or when Michel's father fights with the neighbor after destroying the neighbor's family grave markers. It also has some interesting things to say, especially about the relationship that the country people have with religion and the symbols present that they don't understand. The problem is that as a whole, the storytelling falls short.

First, the tonal shifts don't even work out. We go from dead parents and a dead dog, to Paulette burying and mourning the dog (but not her parents) to Michel losing his brother, to apparent comedic moments between the neighbor families. But the tonal changes aren't smooth and they aren't signaled, so when you see a joke on screen shortly after all of the more somber moments, I was left thinking "I guess that's supposed to be funny". On top of that, the film mostly sidesteps issues of death. None of the characters seem to greatly mourn any of the dead people, especially Michel when his brother dies. Also, everyone seems to miss the moment when Michel kills a chick in order to give it to Paulette. The audience sees Michel take the live chick and the next time it's shown he's handing it to Paulette and promising that he didn't kill it while she comments that it's body is still warm. With this content, the later scenes with the populated graveyard, make you wonder how many Michel has murdered in order to feed Paulette's game of crosses. On the other hand, that tension provides the film's greatest virtue, as the characters barely seem to register all of the death around them and instead raise hell over missing pieces of wood.

But overall, despite it's powerful symbolism, the crosses play no part in the overarching plot regarding what happens to Paulette. Neither does the storyline of the bickering neighbors or the loose ends of the neighbor's children in a secret romance. Instead, Paulette is whisked away to an orphanage by deux ex machina in uniform in order to achieve an end to the story, although with an ending so abrupt that it felt like it came from a Monty Python film. A lot more could have been achieved with some foreshadowing to create a sense of stakes. You also have to look pretty hard to see an arc for any of the characters, Michel's perhaps being the most obvious with his encounter with Paulette unveiling a willingness to steal and kill for entertainment.