Saw Forbidden Games, a French film which is a bit of a bummer. It follows a young girl in WW2 who is taken in by a family of farmers after her own parents are killed in an air raid while fleeing Paris. The film is shot from a child's-eye view, revolving mostly around the fast friendship which develops around her and the family's young son. Their relationship is delicate and courtly and childish and completely ignored by the adults in favor of domestic squabbles and these squabbles themselves are completely overshadowed by the war itself. Several times bombs light up the sky at night.
The children's adventures and games revolve mostly around death. The young girl doesn't understand what has happened to her parents and becomes obsessed with the iconography and ceremony of death. It reminds me of Spirit of the Beehive, but this one is more domestic, almost sit-com-ish in its premises and plot. There's a very moving sequence where they are carrying many crosses and singing fearfully as a dogfight happens in the sky above them. They are surrounded by death, drowned out by it. The adults are carrying on feuds and going to church as though nothing were happening. In their way, the kids are the only ones who seem to be actually reacting to death, even though their reaction is inappropriate.
The film is fairly sweet at times and seems to be settling into a sit-com groove of small-town romances and misunderstandings, but it ends on a fairly sour note. It is trying to deal with the realities of lives lost and not just lost as in missing but also as in simply uprooted and misplaced, lost somewhere in transit.
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