Boyer and Clément's Forbidden Games

CHAPTER 5 DEATH WISH, CHILD’S WHIM, AUTEURIST WILL: BOYER AND CLÉMENT’S FORBIDDEN GAMES REPLAYED The kernel of what would eventually become the film of Forbidden Games (1952) was a somber and disquieting screenplay that its author, François Boyer, found impossible to sell. He expediently repackaged the contents as a novel, published in 1947 under the title The Secret Game and virtually ignored in France, but which enjoyed a major, if freakish, commercial success in America. Unexpectedly, it now looked like a hot property, so René Clément and the screenwriting partners Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost took Boyer’s film script-cum-novel and turned it back into a screenplay. But that wasn’t the end of the movie’s tortuous prehistory. Forbidden Games was originally planned as a humble short subject—the middle section of a three-part omnibus or anthology film to be called Cross My Heart and Hope to Die. This larger project got shelved after financing fell through, and the existing footage composed no more than a vignette. Impressed by its lyricism and grace, however, the producer Robert Dorfmann urged Clément to expand the material to feature length. Like many great films, then, Forbidden Games sprang serendipitously from a chain of accidents, failures, and stopgaps, none of which are remotely evident onscreen. Clément’s direction is so scrupulously measured, and the theme so archetypal, that every shot achieves a kind of fatedness. The great French critic André Bazin, writing in Esprit in 1952, judged that there was novelistic control in the way the central situation of the film is developed—astutely, inexorably, with each psychological detail snapping into place. But if a literary analogy is sought, the film’s terse suggestiveness may be closer in spirit to that of a short story. While artfully embellishing the simple episode from which they started, Aurenche and Bost (with the assistance of Boyer) were careful to preserve its fragile, elliptical nature. Forbidden Games, in the end, is a distinctly slender work. Which is really to say that it’s exactly scaled to the intimate, laconic universe of children. Does this mean that Boyer’s novel is as good as the film? No, it doesn’t. Though the book has some strong features, almost all of which can be found back in the film, it also has some shortcomings. It was a success in the United States, and that success can perhaps be explained, paradoxically enough, by the influence of the American novel on its conception (an influence assimilated, moreover, in a rather naïve way). What’s good in Boyer’s novel, beyond the technical aspect, has everything to do with the transmission of authentic personal experience. Its weakness lies in its obvious and systematic intention of putting this personal experience into the objectivist mold 47 Chapter 5 of an Erskine Caldwell. This amoral tone with regard to events—this disposition toward exteriority, as it were—was in fact partly retained by Clément (such that the movie owes a little more than its scenario and dialogue to the book), but what was the weakness of the novel becomes precisely the strength of the film. Such a reversal of values is not simply to be explained away as a question of stylistic measure, which Clément exercised and Boyer didn’t, nor can it be passed off to any other capacity of the director of the film. First and foremost this reversal can be attributed to the different point of view taken by the cinema. For example, whenever Boyer reduces some scenes of his novel to long exchanges of dialogue that contain only rudimentary information about the characters’ behavior, the reader violently resents the absence of any psychological analysis and views it as the affirmation of a kind of moral atomism. For when a novelist reduces a scene solely to the report of the dialogue, he deprives us of his characters, of the characterization of his characters. Frustration creeps in. But in the cinema, the same dialogue is vivified before our eyes by the actors, so that we necessarily get what was denied to us by the novelist: a total and unrestricted relationship with the very personages the author created. Of course, the film director has at his disposal more than one device to reduce some of the frustration felt by the reader, just as, conversely, the novelist can use only dialogue to evoke his characters, their demeanor, and their psychology. Clearly, Faulkner’s dialogue could not be filmed in the same way as Proust’s; something of each novelistic style would have to be retained in its cinematic adaptation, since both are so distinctly revelatory. But—to get back to filming Boyer’s dialogue— because of its technical objectivity, the cinema is actually less objective than the novel that aims at being objective, for we can do nothing against the writer who denies us the soul of his characters, whereas we always have the opportunity subjectively to penetrate the faces, and psyches, of the figures on screen. Thus the excessive “Americanism,” the tendency toward “behaviorism,” in Boyer’s novel naturally dissolves in Clément’s film. What Clément has deliberately retained from the artistic strategies of the book, however, is not what is best in the movie version: for one instance, the harsh treatment of the peasants. Whatever the origins of the film—in Boyer’s original script, his published novel, or both—if those origins certify the achievement of François Boyer, they take nothing away from the achievement of René Clément: indeed, they even partly explain it. It was the intelligence of this director that made him want to keep the intimate structure of a novelistic tale in his motion picture. And he succeeded. We can better understand his success if we now compare Forbidden Games with the “children’s films” that preceded it. Comparison among children’s films reveals that they all have obvious similarities, despite differences in conception and style. The two archetypes come from the early days of talking pictures: Road to Life (1932, dir. Nikolai Ekk), out of the U.S.S.R., and Germany’s Emil and the Detectives (1931, dir. Gerhardt Lamprecht, from the children’s novel by Erich Kastner; filmed six times, including once by 48.

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