Jeux interdits

René Clément (1952)

A famous film but I knew next to nothing about it and its lack of compromise took me by surprise – right from the start as German planes drop bombs on refugees fleeing Paris during the Battle of France in 1940.  These sequences have a documentary rawness.  The family that you think may be singled out for safety – a husband and wife, their young daughter and her pet dog – turn out to be no less vulnerable than anyone else in the confused, frightened crowd.  The startled terrier scampers off over a bridge; the child runs after and recovers it; another shell explodes; her parents and the animal are killed instantly.  Five-year-old Paulette, who is not physically injured, is taken in by a peasant family, the Dolles, and the central relationship of the picture is between her and the family’s youngest son, eleven-year-old Michel.  Paulette hears the adults talking about the German attack, about how terrible it is that the bodies of those killed aren’t properly interred but are buried instead ‘in a hole – like dogs’.   The little girl is acutely aware that, when Michel told her there would be another dog on the farm, she left the corpse of her own dog Jock on a river bank, in the open air.  In the local churchyard, Paulette asks Michel why the graves are all together there.  He says it’s so that the dead people aren’t alone.  Giving Jock a decent burial and company under the earth is how the children’s ‘forbidden games’ start.  They create their own cemetery in an abandoned mill, stealing crosses from the churchyard to mark the animals’ graves.

The Dolles are caught up in a comically exaggerated feud with another local family, the Gouards.  They discuss the war at one remove from it and the only active participant in the armed forces, Francis Gouard, returns as a deserter.   The Dolles are not, however, immune from death:  one of Michel’s elder brothers, Georges, although he seems at first to be a figure of fun, dies from the injuries inflicted by a horse that kicks him.   Ridiculous as they often are, the adults also turn out to have a crucial power.   When police arrive to take Paulette to a refugee camp, Michel agrees to tell his father where the stolen crosses are, on condition that Paulette can stay with the family.   His father appears to agree but, after Michel has revealed the whereabouts of the crosses, fails to keep his part of the bargain:  after all, the police are the police and Michel is only a kid:  Paulette is taken away.  The distraught Michel gets to the barn in time to throw all the crosses, and a wreath that marked his brother’s new grave, into the river – lost, one assumes, without trace.  It’s in this episode, and the final sequence in a Red Cross camp that follows, that Forbidden Games is at its toughest and most upsetting.  Paulette is left alone in the camp for a few moments and hears calls from others of ‘Michel’ and ‘mama’.   She runs towards the calls and disappears, crying and lost, into the crowd of refugees.

These are far from the only affecting scenes in Forbidden Games, which Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost adapted from a 1947 novel by François Boyer called The Secret Game.  (According to Wikipedia, Boyer originally wrote the story as a screenplay but, after failing to excite any studio interest in it, rewrote it as a novel.)  It’s deeply sad and moving to watch Paulette tenaciously retrieve the body of Jock and cling on to it, even though she knows the dog is dead – and that her parents are too.  Pauline Kael rightly praised the subtlety with which René Clément describes this displacement activity (a subtlety which obviously chimes with the child’s lack of consciousness of the psychological explanation of what she’s doing).  The correspondence between the funerary rituals of the children and those of the church after the death of Georges is conveyed with a similar lightness of touch and incisiveness.  The power and the comedy of religion in the family’s life is nicely caught in Michel’s semi-sarcastic jumbling of the words of the Lord Prayer’s and the Magnificat.  The physical texture and routines of the household are convincingly portrayed – the sleeping arrangements, the fact that clothes look to be changed only for an outing to church, the flies settling on people’s faces and expiring in milk.

The long-snouted, bulky mother, played by Suzanne Courtal, is a particularly strong image.  The other older actors include Lucien Herbert (the father), Jacques Marin (Georges) and Amédée (Francis Gouard) but it’s the two children who are the jewels of Forbidden Games.  Brigitte Fossey’s combination of frailty and stubbornness as Paulette is truly remarkable:  René Clément succeeds in shaping her performance without a trace of child acting.  Georges Poujouly as Michel partners her beautifully – he’s especially good at expressing how this boy understands he’s brighter than anyone else in the family of which he’s part.   The guitar music ‘Romance’, played by Narciso Yepes, is familiar (to a modern audience anyway) but it nevertheless provides a haunting accompaniment.

12 April 2014