Mjeteconer Just perfect...

SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Bob Pr. We saw this in a Great Films group for retired university faculty, &c., and I found it very accurate and convincing of how some children will deal with severe loss. (I'm a retired clinical psychologist with quite a bit of experience working with orphans and foster children and I found it very convincing.) Children differ in their reactions to serious events; in this Paulette (age 5) loses her parents and her very dear pet dog to German planes strafing them as they're fleeing Paris early in WW-II. She soon meets an adopting friend, Michel (10), the son of peasant farmers in their rural area, and he gets his family to accept her. He's Catholic (she's not) and Michel teaches her how to say prayers and honor the dead, and together they bury her dead dog (which she'd been carrying) and they somewhat overcome her losses (and his strong need to have a young companion) by building a cemetery, ritually burying other animals, having funeral services (just the 2 of them), and finding (stealing) and putting up crosses on those graves. Very touching but never overdone, IMO. This won many awards including being understandably listed as one of Roger Ebert's "Great Films," an Oscar, et alia.

morrison-dylan-fan With my film viewing having slowed down due to needing to take care of ill family members,I decided to pick things up during the last days of the French challenge on ICM. Finding Purple Noon, The Walls of Malapaga and Les Maudits to be excellent Film Noir's (and also knowing his role behind the classic Beauty and the Beast) I decided that it was time to play games with Rene Clement.The plot:Chasing after her dog during an air raid, Paulette is pushed to the ground by her parents,as a plane starts firing the ground. Getting up,Paulette discovers that along with her pet,mum and dad have also been shot dead. While trying find comfort from her dead pet,Paulette crosses paths with 10 year old Michel Dollé. Finding Paulette all on her own, Dollé gets his family to "unofficially" adopt Paulette.Unable to hold a funeral for her parents,Paulette starts wanting to give her pet a fitting send off,which leads to Dollé playing a forbidden game of stealing crosses for Paulette's animal funerals.View on the film:Not playing games with their impeccable transfer,Studiocanel keep the soundtrack and subtitles crisp and easy to read/listen to,whilst retaining the grain of the image.Expanding on footage shot for an abandoned anthology a year after initial production,co-writer(with Jean Aurenche/Pierre Bost and François Boyer) directing auteur Rene Clement & cinematographer Robert Juillard make the footage blend in seamlessly,with Clement making sure that the fake wigs and teeth hide the growth spurt of the leads. Following the bullets running along the pavement to Paulette's parents,Clement continues expanding on his major visual theme of claustrophobic, confined locations,in the farm of the Dolle's being lined with shadows that Clement enters in stylishly shots allowing the darkness of war to seep into the farm. Staying at the same level as Paulette and Michel,Clement and Juillard give the duo a brisk,crisp appearance which subtly reflects the light they give each other from the darkness of war.Killing Paulette's family within the first 5 minutes (!) the writers make the effect of WWII give the characters a superb, unsettling casual treatment of death,with the lack of awareness the adult Dollé's show towards one of them being on his death bed,matching Paulette showing more interest in her dead pet than her dead parents. Keeping Paulette and Michel's graveyard separate from the adults,the writers brilliantly unearth a satirical cross at the church with the simmering anti-war theme worn with the children performing funeral rituals to deaths that they know nothing of.Encouraged by her parents to take the role,6 year old Brigitte Fossey gives an absolutely incredible performance as Paulette. Heart wrenching continuing to stroke her pet long since taken by the stench of death,Fossey threads Paulette in an innocent (but not naïve) melancholy,lit by Paulette trying to perfect the funeral rituals for her beloved animals-which Paulette is not able to perform for her own family. Just 6 years older than Fossey, Georges Poujouly gives a remarkable,complex performance as Michel. Sharing Paulette's innocence's to death,Poujouly layers Michel with an earthy awareness of the effects that WWII is having on his family,as Michel and Paulette experience the forbidden games of war.

Dalbert Pringle With an intriguing title like "Forbidden Games", I certainly would have hoped that this 1952, foreign film would have proved to be a bit more interesting than it was.This was one of those films that seemed to be specifically aimed at a mature, adult audience, yet its story was so intensely focused on the activities of 2 children that it repeatedly had me wondering what the hell the point was that director Rene Clement was trying to get across to me here.Set in the year 1940 (during Germany's occupation of France in WW2) - Forbidden Games was not only some of the driest, mundane and unimaginative storytelling that I've seen in quite some time - But the incessant spotlight that its story shone onto the subject of religion seriously began to grate on my nerves like you wouldn't believe.It truly amazes me that this nothing-of-a-movie actually won an Oscar for "Best Foreign Film" of that particular year.

Weldon50 Maybe a little bit of a spoiler topic, I'm not sure. Some critics propose the idea that the sweet girl is not merely a victim of loss, but a victim traumatized to the point of sadism. My understanding of the motivation for the burial rituals was a line spoken by the little girl suggesting that dead things needed to be buried, that they should not be left exposed to the elements. This barely articulated idea, obviously, is the result of seeing her parents killed and her carrying her dead dog. I saw no more to their "games" than burials. I did not see killings as a part of it. Is it an absolute certainty that the children kill anything more than a cockroach? I thought the owl killed the mice. Some critics don't mention any killings by the children. Others build arguments about sadism based on their observation that the kids not only buried the animals in more and more elaborate ritual, but killed some of them. I just don't recall seeing a killing.