Review of Forbidden games (2015) by Allan C — 28 Mar 2012

Jeux Interdits (René Clément, 1952).

As of now, there are thirty-seven films on my spreadsheet with five stars.

Which, depending on how many movies you watch, may not seem like an unreasonable number. But to give you a sense of scale, Jeux Interdits (released in English-speaking countries as Forbidden Games) is the 3,175th entry on that spreadsheet, and that's only movies I (a) remember seeing and (b) remember well enough to confidently be able to rate. (For example, I know I saw A Fish Called Wanda on the big screen when it came out, but other than that it stars Jamie Lee Curtis, I couldn't tell you a bloody thing about it right now.) So I've seen at least a handful, in the sense of "a few hundred, probably", more than that. And the number of five-star movies on that list is closer to one percent than to two.

When I thought about it, I realized that there are two kinds of movies to which I've given five stars over the years. There are the films that are, simply, perfect: the acting and directing are impeccable, the soundtrack complements the action precisely, the cinematography is grand without being grandiose, etc., etc. The three movies at the very top of my thousand-best list-Before Night Falls, Hotaru no Haka, and Closetland-all qualify in this regard, as do such other five-star stalwarts as Casablanca and Eli, Eli Lema Sabachthani? and Gilliam's The Fisher King.

And then there is the other, far smaller, group of pictures that got five stars in spite of their flaws, movies so overwhelming or so unexpected or so groundbreaking or so... that I couldn't help but sit there with my jaw hanging open wondering how one person, or one small group of people, was able to come up with something like this. Night of the Living Dead qualifies. XTRO. Lord of Illusions. (Yes, I hear the squawking now. Remember what Ebert said about best-of lists.) And now, Jeux Interdits.

Is it a perfect film? Far from it. Neither Georges Poujouly(Diabolique) nor Brigitte Fossey (The Honey Flowers) is an especially good actor at this very early point in each's career, and they're the main characters. There are times Fossey, especially, is painful to watch. (IMDB notes that while Poujouly went on to almost instant success, Fossey's career over the next decade or so was spotty at best, and she didn't really become a star until the seventies.) And yet, well, what the hell?

Like L'armée des Ombres (elsewhere this ish), this is a French war film that is not a French war film. Instead, it is a gentle comedy, though oddly I have never seen anyone else call it a comedy. I was expecting something dark and thick and unbearably heavy, like a Georges Franju short on rye topped with blackstrap molasses. But it became obvious to me pretty early on that René Clément spent his days hanging out with Jean Renoir drinking themselves silly, eating small chocolates, and smoking Gauloises, or whatever it is French artists did after World War II (and the unfortunate, albeit temporary, banning of absinthe); there is very much a Renoir feel to this movie, though Clément has a much lighter touch with the comedy than Renoir does in La Régle de Jeu, which is what this film put me in mind of time and again as it went on. Not because of any sort of similarity in subject matter or the like, but because Clément and Robert Juillard, who seemed to specialize in war films at the time (his previous job was lensing Rossellini's Germania Anno Zero), captured that same atmosphere-bucolic yet absurd, with a dozen little plots running around trying to upstage one another like the party guests at Renoir's mansion, and my god, but Clément gets us to laugh at the saddest moments. What the hell was he thinking? I have no idea, but whatever it was, it worked, and it worked gloriously.

The main plot-at least, Netflix informed me this was the main plot out of the batch-is pretty darned simple; Paulette (Fossey), a six-year-old girl, is in the process of fleeing German planes with her parents and dog. The parents are killed, and the dog soon after; Paulette wanders the landscape, clutching her lost pet, until she meets up with Michel Dolle (Poujouly), who takes her home to the family. The two bury her dog, and Paulette becomes fascinated with the trappings of death: the rituals of burial, the trappings of the graveyard, etc. Soon the two of them have turned an abandoned, bombed-out mill into a full-scale pet cemetery.

This is far from everything that's going on here. There's a Romeo-and-Juliet subplot with Michel's sister and the son of a rival family from town who may not be the war hero everyone assumes he is. There's Michel's (much) older brother, convalescing after being kicked by a war horse in the early part of the film. There is Paulette, who has presumably been raised atheist, coming to terms with the religion that the rural folk deeply hold. (I don't think I'm reaching there; it seemed to me Clément was definitely drawing a parallel of cosmopolitan atheism and peasant religion, though he never really indicates which he sees a a "better" option, a fence-straddling which is in itself worthy of great praise.)And there is more, but I've already droned on too long. I cannot recommend this film highly enough, if you've not already seen it. It is beautiful and funny and gentle and sad and thought-provoking. It is a masterpiece of filmmaking like we rarely see, and as far as I'm concerned, it's one of the greatest films ever made. *****.