Forbidden Games - Jeux Interdits - The Saddest Movie Ever Made

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The saddest and most harrowing feel-bad movie of all time has to be this one. It is a French wartime themed movie made in 1952. It touches on similar themes to 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, but makes the later movie look like a sit-com, and the children here have no wild fantasy escapist retreat from the uncompromising, relentless brutal reality of war and death. Forbidden Games piles agony on grief and despair scene by scene and never lets go. It begins with refugees trying to flee from the Nazis as France falls rapidly to the German war machine in 1940. The roads are congested, and everyone is on foot, carrying all they can in a slow miserable procession down muddy country lanes. A German fighter plane suddenly opens fire on the refugees, strafing them with bullets. Everyone panics and tries to take cover. A little girl called Paulette, aged about eight, is separated from her parents in the massacre & panic and she will never find them again. The audience knows they are dead. She does however find her little pet dog, who has also died in the attack. She picks up its body and carries it round, hugging it like a teddy bear refusing to let anyone take it off her. Eventually, Paulette is taken in by the owners of a cottage in a quaint rural village. A young boy there, Michel, befriends her, and talks her into giving her dog a decent Christian burial. To conduct the ceremony himself, he steals a small grave-marker from a local people’s cemetery. Realizing that Paulette finds some mild joy in their makeshift pet cemetery, Michel starts burying more and more animals there, many of which he is cruelly killing himself to be able to maintain what he sees as a pleasing innocent game that his new but depressed little friend takes some comfort from. He also takes more and bigger gravestones from the people’s graves for use on the animal graves. The vanishing grave-markers from their cemetery alarms the adult villagers, especially as it could expose their own deadly secret – they are harbouring an army deserter and the occupying Germans are starting to take an interest in the disruption the children are naively causing in the village. The discovery of Michel’s activity leads to the discovery and execution of the soldier and forces the villagers to send the children off to separate orphanages. Paulette, unable to cope with separation from Michel, runs from the nuns who are taking her in, and gets lost in a crowded railway station, crying out in desperate undiluted emotional frustration for Michel and her parents to come and get her. The movie fades out on that with Debussy’s Clair De Lune, a piece of classical music I now find impossible to hear without reflecting on Paulette’s terribly lonely fate. After Forbidden Games, which is brilliant despite its melancholic mood, no film can really hope to get me quite so down in spirits ever again. Arthur Chappell