Forbidden Games (The Criterion Collection)

Forbidden Games is one of the most heartbreaking films that portray wartime and death through the eyes of an adolescence. Directed by the French director Rene Clement, this film tells the story on how children escape into fantasy and denial to deal with the horrors around them. It is June 1940, during the Battle of France. After five-year-old Paulette's parents and pet dog are killed 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 as the two children invent games as a way to shield themselves from the horrors of the war, so they can psychologically come to terms with their confused emotions. 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 barn, where they bury her dog and start to bury other animals, marking their graves with crosses stolen from a local graveyard.

When deeply looking into the story of Forbidden Games there is a darker underlying theme; which is the theme of death. The strange behavior with Paulette and Michel's obsession with death and the bodies of the dead can appear sinister and morbid when looking at it from an adults point of view. But looking at it through a child's eyes and all the horrors they have witnessed and seen, it gives their strange behavior much more understanding. Technically war is responsible for their unusual behavior and how they look at life and death. This film curiously explores these children's dark instinctual curiosities and morbid fascinations on the themes of death and necrophilia, which in human nature is natural; if we could only admit it. Christian themes are obviously the subtext to the film and the actions the children are committing like stealing crosses from dead graves and making a secret cemetery of their own seems very sacrilegious and scandalous. But when analyzing these children you see Paulette as a victim of psychological and emotional trauma who can only understand death and grief through these dead animals and insects which resemble the memory of her dead parents, giving her a morbid comfort.