Review of Forbidden games (2015) by Emanuel D — 22 Sep 2007

Catholics have a morbid fascination with death. One of my first memories of school was being punished for some forgotten misdemeanour by being made to stand in front of a particularly brutal picture of the crucified Christ and being made to realise that I had caused the pain. I had one of those sadistic spinsters for a teacher whose idea of heaven was fetishist indulgencies in whips, crowns of thorns and flesh-piercing nails.

Pretty little Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) did not have this type of education in the first years of her life. Presumably Jewish or from a particularly secular Parisian family, she is first exposed to ritualistic prayer, crucifixes and mediaeval notions of death after she is orphaned in war.

The film starts off with her parentsâ?? death. She chases her dog and her parents chase her across a bridge in the countryside outside Paris that is the target of German bombers in June of 1940. The dog and her parents die but Paulette, who is not a day over 5, has only vague notions of what being dead is like.

She feels the cold cheek of her mother but never gives up on her dog, the corpse of which she keeps holding on to.

Lost in the country she is found by Michel (Georges Poujouly), a farm boy around twice her age who takes her under his wing. It is not hard to love Paulette. Sheâ??s pretty, earnest and tender with a puppy look that would melt a heart of stone.

But the film is not about a sad, helpless, little orphan. Jeux Interdits has an altogether darker subject to explore.

At this juncture in her life, Paulette comes across as a new comer both death as an immediate experience and Christian notions of it. The rites and rituals of death â?? experienced first hand because a brother of Michel, Georges (Jacques Marin) is also dying after a horsing accident â?? expose her to a complex, obscure and fervent system of taboos and dogmas; and what 5 year old can truly be expected to know which is which?

Overhearing the adults talk of how her parents will have been put in a hole, she recruits Michel (who seems to be unable to do anything but her bidding) into developing their own little cemetery first for her dead dog and then for a Noahâ??s arc of accompanying animals.

There can be no doubt that impatient in their plan to create an elaborate altar for the dead, Paulette and Michel did not always wait for animals to meet their ends in their fullness of time.

Their fascination with death is shocking. These little, innocent children, confused by prayers they do not understand and a Christian symbolic code which seems uninterested in anything but the end of life, become effective necrophiliacs.

It is hard to describe the experience of seeing a pretty 5 year old blonde girl with big eyes, innocent smile and endearing baby talk while thinking about murder, necrophilia, grave robbery, sacrilege and what in other times would have been called witchcraft.

Still it is hard to miss what Clément is telling us. Within days of their birth, parents take their children to a church filled with symbols of brutal death. Within hours that a new life is celebrated, families thank the heavens by that gesture on their bodies representing a man, tortured to death and nailed to a three.

The altar of death that Michel erects for Paulette is not unlike the elaborate holy sepulchres set up in churches over Easter. Mountains of flowers, of decorations, of gold and of brass are set up and scented with dizzying incense. Children with barely a notion of night and day are taken to see this spectacle and their parents whisper in their ears little understood mythologies about a dead Jesus in there.

Paulette and Michel urgently scrounge for crosses, snail shells, flowers and pebbles to decorate the tombs of their dead. Theirs is but a childâ??s extension of our own childish notions about death. What could be more absurdly ridiculous as the idea of an after life? What could be more morbidly pointless as obscure notions of hell, of heaven, of ghosts, of divine justice and of saintly intercession?

The two children, shocking as their behaviour may be, are merely elaborating their own version â?? crude but no less thorough â?? of religion, personal or organised. In their minds they have created a cosmology of life, death and eternity. True, theirs is an innocent form of necrophilia. But that only makes it a saner version of the collective necrophilia of religion, Christianity being prominent in that genus and Catholicism being an especially morbid subset.

Folded inside this apparently simple story of a war orphan is a critical and harsh confrontation of a basic dogma of a believerâ??s existence: that life and individuality are not framed by birth and death and that therefore the living must not merely honour the dead as a memory but as if they were still in immediate existence.

This is a highly sophisticated philosophical theme but the beauty of this film is that it does not feel like a post-modernist deconstruction of St Jerome or Immanuel Kant. What you think youâ??re watching is a sad daub about a war orphan but here you are really playing a forbidden game.