[Join Ettes leader and Fond Object founder Coco Hames as she moves through the Janus Films Essential Art House DVD box set one film at a time.]
FORBIDDEN GAMES directed by RENE CLEMENT (1952)
Running time: 86 minutes
En français avec les soutes-titres en anglais
I've made no bones about my sensitivity to wartime cinema, and Forbidden Games is no exception. The film opens with tiny Paulette (played by 5-year-old Brigitte Fossey) and her parents fleeing Nazi air raids and bombings, and bad things happen. I don't feel responsible for a spoiler, as most everything written about this film starts with telling you she's an orphan. She WASN'T an orphan, until enemy planes gunned down her family as they were fleeing Paris. (The casualties include a dog, something I INSIST people tell me beforehand, because I get very upset.) And so our little protagonist moves on, alone, just trying to keep daily life going — um, with the corpse of said dog in hand.
She finds a friend in country boy Michel (Georges Poujouly, who would later voice the animated Tintin series, among other things). He stumbles upon her during his daily farm routine, and the two make an immediate connection about family, life, war and death. The death part is the biggest deal. You're slackjawed watching these two small kids just dealing with the daily turmoil and loss that is wartime life, and you're arrested by the way they deal with the tragedy, in their actions and in their imaginations. They're protective of each other, and they're sacred in their weirdo kid renditions of the rituals we adults observe, religious and otherwise, for the sake of family and country without questioning.
