Film Comment: Forbidden Games

The 1952 French film, Forbidden Games (Les jeux interdits) , won numerous best film awards including a 1952 special foreign film Academy Award and a Golden Lion best actress award for the five-year old Brigitte Fossey .  Some of the published comments describe the film as "childhood innocence corrupted," "the horrors of war through the eyes of children," "children using their powers of fantasy and denial to deal with death in wartime."  It is a film which is both funny, creepy, horrifying, and incredibly sad.  The children are real children, not little adults.

Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) really is the center of the film.  Film critic Roger Ebert says of her, "Fossey's face becomes a mirror that refuses to reflect what she must see and feel."  And it is her eyes that house the mirror.

The plot of the film: a young girl is orphaned in a Nazi air attack on civilians fleeing from Paris and is taken in by a ten-year old boy and his family.  The boy helps Paulette secretly bury her dog, which died along with her parents in the air raid.  Worried that the dog is alone in the ground, the children begin to bury other dead animals and they create a secret cemetery, stealing crosses to place on each grave.  They build an elaborate fantasy world around the cemetery.  The fantasy world will, of course, eventually come crashing down.

In this film, as with most others I view, I appreciate and understand the artistry and intentions of the filmmakers.  I also see things which may or may not have originally been intended; specifically, I see things through a Christian lens.

The main thing which I see in this film is how all the adults failed the children.  The Nazis callously killed adults and children alike with their air raids.  The adults who pulled Paulette onto their wagon were so intent on their escape that they failed to restrain or go after Paulette when she jumped off the wagon to retrieve her dead dog.  The kindly and basically well-meaning peasant family who took Paulette in were so wrapped up in their sometimes silly adult dealings that they basically ignored the children because they were "just" children.  The priest is more interested in catechisms and confessions and correct ritual than in understanding the children.  The government officials who come for Paulette want to make sure their papers are properly completed.  The kind nun at the train station tells Paulette to quietly sit on a bench and then leaves her alone.  None of the adults, except for the Nazis, are "bad people."  They just fail to actually see the children.   Sometimes you have to take a crayon, get down on the floor, and color with a child.