Forbidden Games

Ten years ago, I went though a phase where I watched Forbidden Games (Les Jeux Interdits) at least twice a week. Every camera shot meant something. The lighting meant something. I adored the music. I even wrote an essay on it, a terrible, sprawling essay that for the life of me I can't remember a thing about, except that I saw so much in the film that I couldn't really narrow myself down to a thesis and needed someone to help me figure out something lucid to say.

The film focuses on a five year-old girl whose parents die while fleeing Paris during its occupation, and how she is taken into the care of a young farm boy and his family. The boy and girl start burying animals and playing cemetery to understand death. The film created something of a scandal at the time of its release, and received some terrible reviews. But now the film is seen as a classic of French film, though I've never met anyone familiar with the film who isn't French.

I see it so differently, now. I have similar reactions as I had in the past, but now all of a sudden the dark humor in the film has more weight, as does its personal antiwar statement. What stood out in the past was the purity of the characters, the love story, the music, the countryside. It's swimming in beauty but it's dark, and I focused more on its beauty. I never saw exactly how macabre the film was. The cemetery they create is enchanting and sweet and innocent, you almost forget how fucked up it is for children to make one.

Funny how the things you love when you are young don't look the same when you're older. I am no longer passionate about it, the way I was. I know it too well. I wonder if somehow I've absorbed its beauty so completely that I've taken it for granted, and now it's the other things in the film that stand out. I still love it, though. I still think the film is perfect. There are very few false moments. You could argue that there are none.