After both of her parents and the family dog are killed by German planes strafing the countryside during the blitzkrieg summer of 1940, five-year-old Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) seeks shelter with a rural farming family, the Dolles. Taken under the wing of the adventurous 11-year-old Michel Dolle (Georges Poujouly), Paulette becomes his adored playmate, schooled in the subtleties of country life. But when Paulette and Michel begin a strange ritual of burying dead animals -- cockroaches, dogs, birds -- in a secret graveyard, director Rene Clement plumbs the universal human dilemma of coping with death, using children as his guides. Clement found inspiration for his lifelong interest in the effect of war on children while making his 1948 film The Walls of Malapaga. He asked a young girl performing in a scene in that film why she acted with her hand in her pocket. The crying child then withdrew a misshapen hand that had been badly injured during the war.
Adult behavior only mystifies Michel and Paulette, whether it's the by-rote religious rituals or the ugly feud between the Dolles and their next-door neighbors. The children's game soon becomes an obsession and the culmination of the film is a heartbreaking battle between childish imagination and adult insensitivity.
Like the school of realism that dominated Italian cinema after the war, Rene Clement's blend of visual poetry and documentary-style truthfulness brought a jolting sense of honesty and scrupulous detail to French cinema of the time. Clement was said to have found inspiration for his film's realistic look in the 17th-century paintings of Dutch masters Pieter de Hooch and Jan Vermeer. The director's taste for realism was also certainly honed while making the French Resistance film La Bataille du Rail (1946). Forbidden Games was considered Clement's masterwork in a postwar generation of filmmakers that included Rene Claire, Marcel Carne, Jean Renoir and Julien Duvivier. Forbidden Games was often cited, along with Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937), as one of the consummate French films about war and its emotional toll.
Though Clement initially studied to be an architect at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he found his true vocation in filmmaking. Early on, Clement helped Jean Cocteau as a technical collaborator on his sumptuous fantasy La Belle et La Bete (1946). But Clement's own stylistic influences were more in line with Italian neo-realism, and his own work in France anticipated the maverick veracity of the French New Wave.
Forbidden Games was initially planned as one chapter in a three-part anthology film about childhood. But halfway through the production, Clement realized the story would be perfectly suited to a full-length film and so abandoned the notion.
The performances of the two child actors in Forbidden Games go far in making Clement's film the classic it has become. Just five years old at the time, Fossey was dubbed "the miracle child of French cinema," in a performance especially remarkable considering her youth and her lack of professional experience. After performing at age 10 in Gene Kelly's production of The Happy Road (1957), Fossey studied philosophy in Paris and eventually returned to cinema as a young adult in the sixties and seventies in films such as The Wanderer (1967) and The Man Who Loved Women (1977).
Forbidden Games was not an immediate hit in France, though it soon became an international sensation when it was shown at the 1952 Cannes International Film Festival. The film was initially overlooked as a possible competitor at Cannes, perhaps because it was deemed too morose. But after the film was shown unofficially at the festival, a body of journalists and cinema insiders gathered to announce their unanimous, enthusiastic support of the film and outrage that, had the film been included in the official competition, it would certainly have won first place. American critics welcomed the film just as enthusiastically, with the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther proclaiming Forbidden Games "a brilliant and devastating drama...uncorrupted by sentimentality or dogmatism in its candid view of life."
Producer: Robert Dorfmann
Director: Rene Clement
Screenplay: Rene Clement, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, based on the novel Les Jeux Inconnus by Francois Boyer
Cinematography: Robert Juillard
Production Design: Paul Bertrand
Music: Narciso Yepes
Principal Cast: Brigitte Fossey (Paulette), Georges Poujouly (Michel Dolle), Lucien Hubert (Dolle, the Father), Suzanne Courtal (Mme Dolle), Jacques Marin (Georges Dolle), Laurence Badie (Berthe Dolle).
BW-85m.
In French with English subtitles
