Forbidden Games

1952 Academy Award winner, Best Foreign Film.  Synopsis: young orphan Paulette and farm boy Michel deal with the actualities of death during World War II.

This is a difficult movie to describe.  At times harrowing, hysterical, and yet tragic.  In order to give a review of my thoughts, some plot points may be deemed by some as spoilers.  You have been warned!

This movie opens up with one of the most harrowing and realistic views of WW2.  Paulette, her parents, and her dog are evacuating Paris and crossing into the countryside when an airstrike occurs.  Her parents are killed, but Paulette has no understanding of what has happened.  She picks up her dog and gets a ride with an elderly farm couple.  The woman realizes the dog is also dead and throws him off the bridge.  Paulette chases after the dog and winds up on the bank, where she is found by Michel, who has been chasing a renegade cow from his family's farm.  He decides to take Paulette home to see if his family will let him keep her.

At the farm, Michel's older brother has been gravely injured in a cart accident and while the family tends to him, they continue a feud with their neighbors.  They claim the neighbor's son is a deserter from the army, but unbeknownst to them he is wooing their daughter.

Paulette notices a graveyard with crosses and asks Michel to explain why people are buried there.  After Michel explains to her his minimal grasp of religious ceremonies, she decides to bury her dog in the Mill house.  However, she is afraid he will be lonely, so she decides to bury other animals there, while Michel begins to steal crosses to creat a perfect burial ground.

So, there's the spoilers, as they may be.  Back to the review:  This movie is one of the most evocative views of tragedy seen through a child's eyes.  Despite the horror that Paulette has seen, she finds peace and satisfaction at the "forbidden games" that she and Michel have created.  After all, she is only duplicating what she sees the adults doing with their dead.

But don't think this is a total downer of a film.  The feud between the farm neighbors adds some unexpected, and almost slapstick comedy to the preceedings.  At one point the rivalry escalates into an hysterical fight in the graveyard between the patriachs, compounded by the fact that no one is quite sure who has been stealing the crosses from the graves.

However, reality does eventually set in, and the ending is heartbreaking, to say the least.

Thanks to TCM I finally got to see this film, and I was overwhelmed!  The main key to the movie is Paulette, and this six year old gives the most unaffected, natural, non-artifice performance I've seen since "The Fall" (see my earlier blog.)  Your heart really goes out to her throughout the movie.

It is also beautifully filmed in black and white, with a score that doesn't overtake the film, but subtly enhances it. 

In a word...a Masterpiece.