Review of Forbidden Games

It’s said that you don’t understand war until you see the eyes of the children whose lives have been ruined by it. Director René Clément takes this further by creating a film from the perspective of two such children during the Nazi assault of Paris in 1940.

Paulette is fleeing Paris with her parents when a dive bomber attacks their refugee line. In the havoc, Paulette’s puppy escapes from her arms. Paulette runs after it while her parents scream and chase her. They manage to push Paulette to the ground just before a plane flies low and riddles their bodies with bullets. The girl looks up and stares into the twisted, pained face of her dead mother. The puppy convulses in her arms, having been crushed in the commotion. After a few moments, it’s dead too.

She’s alone, now.

Paulette wanders off the line of Parisians with her puppy in her arms and eventually comes to a farmstead where she meets a slightly older boy named Michel. He’s fascinated by this immaculately dressed child from the city and brings her home to his family. Even though they struggle to feed themselves, they eventually relent and take on another addition to the family.

A sibling bond develops between Paulette and Michel. He becomes her protector and, in a way, her enabler. Paulette finally decides to bury her puppy in a mill next to a stream. Michel helps her. After creating a makeshift cross and praying for the animal, they take their leave. But Paulette is afraid that her dog will be lonely without friends. So the two children begin to find dead animals to add to their hidden cemetery. When there aren’t any, they kill some.

In order to improve their burial ground, Michel and Paulette begin stealing crosses from the cemetery behind the local church. After all, they’re much nicer crosses than what they had been making. Soon the cemetery is lavishly decorated with trinkets adorning the graves and improvised names scibbled on pieces of paper tacked to the crosses.

During one scene, Paulette looks up to Michel and happily tells him that they’ll continue adding members: a cat, cow, horse, tiger, and eventually, even people.

What was at first a childrens’ game begins to show its disturbing extent.

Social workers are often amazed at just how much horror children can seemingly adapt to. Forbidden Games asks the question: “What exactly do they adapt into?” Paulette loses her parents and dog; Michel loses his brother. Neither fully understands his or her loss. They can only try to put those losses into a context that they’re familiar with. The end result is a game that mimics the adult rituals that must seem so odd to them.

This game also serves to insulate both children from the reality of war. Paulette will never see her home or parents again. Michel has a brother that is dying a slow death in his bed. Yet so long as they can collect the dead for their own secret cemetery, the kids have a purpose and a distraction.

Although morbid, the story also finds its humor in mirroring the actions of the children and adults. Michel and Paulette’s game of creating more dead to bury is no less ridiculous than the war itself. If the cemetery seems gaudy and trite, what does that make of a religion whose words can only ring hollow in the face of so much senseless, wanton death?

Ultimately, the test of a truly great film is whether or not it can end on a note that is honest to its message rather than to the box office. French authorities eventually discover that Paulette is an orphan and she is handed over to be shipped away with other children. Michel rages against his parents to no avail. The little sister he had found was taken away from him. He runs back to the mill by the stream and begins destroying the cemetery. The game can no longer comfort.

Paulette sits in a train station, wide eyed and terrified, as a nun places a name card around her neck. It’s at this moment that she realizes everything that she has lost. She looks frantically into the shuffling crowd and picks out a woman who vaguely resembles her mother. The final scene is the little girl weaving through the throngs of people, screaming for her mom.

There is no happy, Hollywood ending. How can there be with war?