Forbidden Games is, in my opinion, a great motion picture. As a work of art, as an emotional experience, or as a demonstration of how skilfully the simplest techniques of motion pictures can be used, this French film ranks with the very best.

The plot is essentially uncomplicated: a little girl, having seen her parents machine-gunned to death by a German plane as they fled across France in 1940, becomes obsessed with ideas of death and burial. She and a boy from the family with whom she takes refuge build a cemetery for animals in an old mill, and steal crosses from local graves to mark the resting places of dead animals. Eventually they are found out, and their little game comes to an end.

For all its morbidity, the picture is in no sense ghoulish. The children carry through their scheme seriously and tenderly, with a religious sense of dedication. Throughout, there is a subtle blending of a primitively religious motif with the workings of a subconscious death-wish on two ingenuous and sensitive minds, all to considerable dramatic effect. The two children chosen to play the leads--Brigitta Fossey and Georges Poujouly--are in every way equal to the demands of their roles.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the film is the economy of time and motion with which the many supporting players are built into full bodied characters. Everyone is passing through a crisis--not the general crisis of the German invasion, but individual petty crises. They act as people defending what each values most highly--be it his life, his love, or his religious convictions. There is little of the unimportant small talk on which most pictures rely for atmosphere and background. Only what is essential is shown, and the result is a fast pace and an emotional tension which survives the barrier of language and the jarring intrusion of subtitles.

There is humor too. Even in the moments of strongest feeling there are elements of the ludicrous and the whimsical, springing mainly from an inter-family feud that weaves its way through the picture. But the humor is strictly secondary; Forbidden Games is a chronicle of people in turmoil, and as such it is high tragedy indeed.