Last week I had the pleasure of reviewing the bleak, moving French film Gervaise, by director Réne Clément. Skip forward seven days and I have sat down, black coffee in hand, to watch Oscar-winning Forbidden Games, also by Clément; released four years prior to Gervaise in 1952. Luckily, this turned out to be an equally intimate, heartbreaking – yet at times darkly comic – picture.
The film, set in 1940’s France at the height of the Second World War, revolves around young Paulette (played by an incredible Brigitte Fossey), a six year old girl whose parents are killed in a Nazi air attack whilst fleeing Paris. Stranded in the countryside and ignored by other evacuees, Paulette is eventually rescued by Michel Dollé (Georges Poujouly) and taken in by his poor, country family. The children quickly form a close relationship and we watch them attempt, in their naive, innocent way, to make sense of the death they see around them.
The tagline of Forbidden Games was “War… and how it affects the lives of our children”. Such a blunt, cursory description gives no indication of the imaginative and unsentimental way with which this topic is dealt. This is no Spielberg-esque sob-fest; we do not see Paulette weeping over the bodies of her parents whilst the Nazi bombers disappear into a blood-red sky (not least because this is a black and white film). Instead, Paulette seems almost unaffected, gently smiling at her dead mother’s face before pulling herself up and grabbing her pet dog. She clambers aboard a nearby cart with an elderly couple, at which point the audience experiences the first moment of black humour, as the woman grabs Paulette’s dog, tells her it is dead, and unceremoniously flings his body over the bridge.
From then on, the context of war is almost forgotten, lingering only in the background as the children try to deal with the constant presence of death: be it of Paulette’s parents, her pet dog, or Michel’s brother. Instead of war between countries, the film focuses on the feud between the Dollé family and their neighbouring Gouards, which leaves the adults obsessed and the children largely ignored. Paulette and Michel, given no guidance on how to come to terms with bereavement, displace their sadness, becoming fixated with building an animal cemetery in an abandoned mill. Michel teaches cosmopolitan Paulette about religion and the role of the cross, and so Paulette begins to covet crucifixes, instructing love-struck Michel to steal them for her. The children experience the symbols with no understanding of their meaning and although this could simply be read as an extension of their immaturity, I also took it as a general critique of religious symbolism and its irrelevance in the face of death and human emotion.
The audience becomes so engrossed with the thieving antics of the children that it forgets the bigger picture of war and Paulette’s orphan status. The end of the film then comes as a shock, with the Dollé adults happily handing Paulette over to the authorities, despite previously seeming so attached to her. The last heart-wrenching scene shows Paulette running through a crowd of adults, calling desperately for Michel, before “Fin” appears, cruelly, on the screen. As with Gervaise, this film adheres to the brutal reality of life, and refuses to provide the happy ending that the audience hope for.
Although at times the pacing felt somewhat slow, on the whole this film is a beautiful, honest and piercingly perceptive reading of the impact of war on young children. Studio Canal recently re-released both Forbidden Games and Gervaise as part of a Réne Clément centenary box-set, and I would highly recommend tracking it down.
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