FORBIDDEN GAMES (1952)
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
5:15 PM*
Friday May 02
Monday May 05
11:30 AM
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
2:30 PM
Thursday May 08
5:45 PM*
Tuesday May 13
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: M
Duration: 86 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Brigitte Fossey, Georges Poujouly, Amédée, Laurence Badie
Director: René Clément
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
5:15 PM*
Friday May 02
Monday May 05
11:30 AM
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
2:30 PM
Thursday May 08
5:45 PM*
Tuesday May 13
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: M
Duration: 86 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Brigitte Fossey, Georges Poujouly, Amédée, Laurence Badie
Director: René Clément
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
“Over the years countless films have been made about war, its horrors and its devastations. Few, however, have been as moving and heartfelt as René Clément’s Forbidden Games. The Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film in 1952, this deeply touching French drama has stirred the emotions of every moviegoer who has had the good fortune to see it… Fossey’s is quite simply one of the most uncanny pieces of acting ever attempted by a youngster. Clément’s sensitivity doubtless accounts for much of what we see here, but the rest is clearly Fossey’s own.”– David Ehrenstein
After five-year-old Paulette's parents and pet dog die in a German air attack on a column of refugees fleeing Paris, the traumatized child meets 10-year-old Michel Dollé whose peasant family takes her in. She quickly becomes attached to Michel. The two attempt to cope with the death and destruction that surrounds them by secretly building a small cemetery among the ruins of an abandoned watermill.
Introduced by John McDonald at Ritz Cinemas and Paul Harris at Lido Cinemas
“Over the years countless films have been made about war, its horrors and its devastations. Few, however, have been as moving and heartfelt as René Clément’s Forbidden Games. The Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film in 1952, this deeply touching French drama has stirred the emotions of every moviegoer who has had the good fortune to see it… Fossey’s is quite simply one of the most uncanny pieces of acting ever attempted by a youngster. Clément’s sensitivity doubtless accounts for much of what we see here, but the rest is clearly Fossey’s own.”– David Ehrenstein
After five-year-old Paulette's parents and pet dog die in a German air attack on a column of refugees fleeing Paris, the traumatized child meets 10-year-old Michel Dollé whose peasant family takes her in. She quickly becomes attached to Michel. The two attempt to cope with the death and destruction that surrounds them by secretly building a small cemetery among the ruins of an abandoned watermill.
Introduced by John McDonald at Ritz Cinemas and Paul Harris at Lido Cinemas
FILM NOTES
By Peter Hourigan
Peter Hourigan is a Melbourne-based film enthusiast of many years standing.
RENÉ CLÉMENT
René Clément has been described as an important link between the poetic realists of the 1930s and the French New Wave, but since the 1950s his reputation has languished. Born in 1913, Clément studied architecture. His career in cinema started in 1936 when he made a short film with Jacques Tati. During the war he worked making shorts; then in 1946 he made La bataille du rail (Battle of the Rails) a neorealist-inflected feature about the resistance to the Nazi occupation by railroad workers during the war. A multi-prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival, it is still a powerful film. He won more prizes in the 1950s, including for Les jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952) and his adaptation of Émile Zola’s Gervaise (1956). His 1960 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, as Plein soleil (Full Sun, aka Purple Noon) made a star of Alain Delon. After Full Sun, Clément was involved in a series of less interesting, more commercial films, some with American involvement, such as Les félins (The Love Cage aka Joy House, 1964) with Jane Fonda for M.G.M. His last critical and commercial film was Paris brûle-t-il? (Is Paris Burning?, 1966) for Paramount, a blockbuster about the Resistance in Paris in 1944. After several lacklustre films in the early 70s, he retired. In 1954, an article by François Truffaut in Cahiers du cinéma denounced some of France’s then most prominent directors, including Clément, as has-beens, makers of moribund ‘cinéma de qualité’ (films focused on literary screenplays, historical or nationalist subjects, and an increasing attention to production values). This had a negative attitude on his critical reputation. In a feature film career of thirty years, he made several masterpieces, and some clinkers. And after watching on television his 1963 film, Le jour et l’heure (The Day and the Hour), another film about the wartime Resistance, François Truffaut felt compelled to write a letter of apology to Clément for his earlier criticisms. Clément’s final film, La baby sitter (1975) was not well received. He died in 1996.
THE FILM
In May 1940, an estimated two million Parisians fled their city ahead of the imminent arrival of German troops. Many on foot, with hand carts or carrying a few possessions, they clogged the roads out of the city. On many of those roads they were an open target for German planes. This experience forms the opening moments of Forbidden Games. When the film was released in 1952, these painful and humiliating events were not long in the past.
These opening scenes, feeling like newsreel footage, show Clément’s documentary skills. Then we close in on five-year-old Paulette, still holding her limp dog, and hardly seeming to be aware that her parents have been killed by a plane strafing the refugees.
From this point we are in the innocent world of children, “innocent” both in the sense of having no guilt, and also in the sense of being completely unaware of what has happened in the way an older child would understand. Michel, an eleven-year-old from a nearby farm, takes Paulette under his wing, looking after her like an older brother. She wants to bury her dog. So, Michel helps her create a small cemetery for the dog, and then for other birds or insects Paulette wants buried there to keep the dog company. Michel sees nothing strange in doing this for her.
Forbidden Games is a simple tale simply told: no trumpeting of big, significant themes; a picture of charming naivety. Or is it? The film rather challenges us to reflect on ideas deeper than the children’s awareness. What lies behind Paulette’s need to establish the cemetery? When we have to face death, why do we call upon ceremony, religion, rituals? The children steal crosses from the village church for their cemetery. As the notes for the Criterion DVD release say, ‘In a world where the currency of death has been cheapened, their crimes ironically restore to it a portion of its original sacramental awe and gravity.’(1)
The same notes remind us that Michel is old enough to have acquired a degree of consciousness and a capacity for guilt. Paulette embodies a pure innocence. And yet, Brigitte Fossey (who also had an adult career as an actor) has compared her character in the film to Lady Macbeth, ‘batting her huge, liquid eyes and spurring the mesmerised [Michel] on to ever greater deeds of blood lust.’
If the French themselves were lukewarm to the film on first release, perhaps it was because it may have seemed too simple for that complicated period of recent French history. But the film is now acclaimed, because it caught the spirit of that time as children would have seen it. It also caught how children have coping mechanisms when faced with monumental trauma. If Paulette channels her attention on her dog, Michel also quickly takes on the maturity to realise that Paulette needs care and love to survive. But he also needs, at the very least, distraction from the world going on around him. Paulette may have lost her parents but is Michel much better off in his family?
Watching how these two children survive in a world that has collapsed for them, I am reminded of a film from three years later, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955). Again, there are two children whose ages almost match those in Forbidden Games. Here, 10-year-old John takes on the caring role for his 4-year-old sister Pearl. Both directors show an ability to recreate a troubling world as it appears to children of different ages, and how quickly and capably children grow up and can take on onerous responsibilities.
On the soundtrack of Forbidden Games, we have a simple guitar theme played by Spanish guitarist Narcisco Yepes. The simple theme had already been in Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941) and is even known to exist recorded on a cylinder from around 1900. (2) Whatever the source of the theme, its use in Forbidden Games could not be more appropriate. The restraint, the plaintiff tune and the melancholy become so much of the texture of the film – and it may become an earworm for you.
The film had been criticised for trivialising war. But as Roger Ebert wrote in 2005, ‘The film is so powerful because it does not compromise on two things: the horror of war and the innocence of childhood.’(3)
Notes
1. Peter Matthews, ‘Forbidden Games: Death and the Maiden’, Criterion DVD booklet.
2. https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=145717&forumID=1&archive=0
3. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-forbidden-games-1952
These opening scenes, feeling like newsreel footage, show Clément’s documentary skills. Then we close in on five-year-old Paulette, still holding her limp dog, and hardly seeming to be aware that her parents have been killed by a plane strafing the refugees.
From this point we are in the innocent world of children, “innocent” both in the sense of having no guilt, and also in the sense of being completely unaware of what has happened in the way an older child would understand. Michel, an eleven-year-old from a nearby farm, takes Paulette under his wing, looking after her like an older brother. She wants to bury her dog. So, Michel helps her create a small cemetery for the dog, and then for other birds or insects Paulette wants buried there to keep the dog company. Michel sees nothing strange in doing this for her.
Forbidden Games is a simple tale simply told: no trumpeting of big, significant themes; a picture of charming naivety. Or is it? The film rather challenges us to reflect on ideas deeper than the children’s awareness. What lies behind Paulette’s need to establish the cemetery? When we have to face death, why do we call upon ceremony, religion, rituals? The children steal crosses from the village church for their cemetery. As the notes for the Criterion DVD release say, ‘In a world where the currency of death has been cheapened, their crimes ironically restore to it a portion of its original sacramental awe and gravity.’(1)
The same notes remind us that Michel is old enough to have acquired a degree of consciousness and a capacity for guilt. Paulette embodies a pure innocence. And yet, Brigitte Fossey (who also had an adult career as an actor) has compared her character in the film to Lady Macbeth, ‘batting her huge, liquid eyes and spurring the mesmerised [Michel] on to ever greater deeds of blood lust.’
If the French themselves were lukewarm to the film on first release, perhaps it was because it may have seemed too simple for that complicated period of recent French history. But the film is now acclaimed, because it caught the spirit of that time as children would have seen it. It also caught how children have coping mechanisms when faced with monumental trauma. If Paulette channels her attention on her dog, Michel also quickly takes on the maturity to realise that Paulette needs care and love to survive. But he also needs, at the very least, distraction from the world going on around him. Paulette may have lost her parents but is Michel much better off in his family?
Watching how these two children survive in a world that has collapsed for them, I am reminded of a film from three years later, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955). Again, there are two children whose ages almost match those in Forbidden Games. Here, 10-year-old John takes on the caring role for his 4-year-old sister Pearl. Both directors show an ability to recreate a troubling world as it appears to children of different ages, and how quickly and capably children grow up and can take on onerous responsibilities.
On the soundtrack of Forbidden Games, we have a simple guitar theme played by Spanish guitarist Narcisco Yepes. The simple theme had already been in Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941) and is even known to exist recorded on a cylinder from around 1900. (2) Whatever the source of the theme, its use in Forbidden Games could not be more appropriate. The restraint, the plaintiff tune and the melancholy become so much of the texture of the film – and it may become an earworm for you.
The film had been criticised for trivialising war. But as Roger Ebert wrote in 2005, ‘The film is so powerful because it does not compromise on two things: the horror of war and the innocence of childhood.’(3)
Notes
1. Peter Matthews, ‘Forbidden Games: Death and the Maiden’, Criterion DVD booklet.
2. https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=145717&forumID=1&archive=0
3. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-forbidden-games-1952
THE RESTORATION
Restored by Studio Canal with the support of the
CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée. Laboratory TransPerfect
Media
Director: René Clément; Production Company: Silver Films, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Producer: Robert Dorfmann; Script: Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, René Clément, François Boyer from a novel by Boyer; Photography: Robert Juillard; Editor: Roger Dwyre; Art Direction: Paul Bertrand; Music: Narciso Yepes; Costumes: Majo Brandley.
Cast: Brigitte Fossey (Paulette), Georges Poujouly (Michel Dollé), Amédée (Francis Gouard), Laurence Badie (Berthe Dollé), Madeleine Barbulée (Red Cross Sister), Suzanne Courtal (Madame Dollé), Lucien Hubert (Joseph Dollé), Jacques Marin (Georges Dollé).
France | 1952 | 86 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour | French with English subtitles | M
Director: René Clément; Production Company: Silver Films, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Producer: Robert Dorfmann; Script: Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, René Clément, François Boyer from a novel by Boyer; Photography: Robert Juillard; Editor: Roger Dwyre; Art Direction: Paul Bertrand; Music: Narciso Yepes; Costumes: Majo Brandley.
Cast: Brigitte Fossey (Paulette), Georges Poujouly (Michel Dollé), Amédée (Francis Gouard), Laurence Badie (Berthe Dollé), Madeleine Barbulée (Red Cross Sister), Suzanne Courtal (Madame Dollé), Lucien Hubert (Joseph Dollé), Jacques Marin (Georges Dollé).
France | 1952 | 86 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour | French with English subtitles | M