I think we have to hang the entire plot on "weird stuff happens during the war." I mean, a lot of the actual events are pretty normal, but how and why they happen is not. After all, this girl is only wandering around the farm where the story takes place because her parents are killed in the first five minutes--the family she stays with is made up of total strangers; they don't even know her last name. I think she is meant to be Jewish, but we have no way of knowing if that's true, either. We know essentially nothing about the child, and that alone makes the rest of the story more than a little odd.

It's early World War II in France. Refugees are fleeing Paris, including crossing narrow bridges over rivers. Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) and her parents are now on foot, their car having broken down. In one horrible moment, the planes fly across the bridge, firing machine guns, and suddenly, Paulette is an orphan. She makes her way to the Dolle farm, home of, most notably, Michel Dolle (Georges Poujouly), who is perhaps eight to Paulette's perhaps five. (The actors are eight and six, but Paulette seems younger.) She has held her dog's body since the attack, and part of how Michel wins over the skittish child is by persuading her to bury the dog. However, she does not feel she can leave him alone, so they decide to build a pet cemetary of their own in the old mill. This leads to the forbidden game of the title--a search for crosses to put over the graves.

The thing is, our Paulette is probably not the only child in her situation, Jewish or not. Oh, not all of them are burying earthworms under elaborate crosses stolen from graveyards, I grant you. However, many of them were separated from parents, whether those parents were living or dead--a thing they themselves may well not have known. Many were, no doubt, taken in by strangers, at least for a time. War can change a lot in a country, and while I find it unlikely that the Dolles would have cared for a strange child at any other time, there is little doubt here about what would have happened to her family. Poor child; she has no place else to go, really, and had the Dolles not taken her in, she probably would have kept wandering until either someone did or she died.

And yet it is a strangely funny movie. What happens around the children is serious, but their antics in building the cemetary in the mill are pretty funny. The feud between the Dolles and their neighbours, the Gouards, is pretty funny, too. The encounter between Michel and the priest (Louis Saintève) is actually hilarious. However, it's a rather bittersweet humour, given that we know the farms are underneath dogfights every night. It's funny, but there are Nazis just around the corner. It's funny, but if Paulette really is Jewish (and I may just be reading too much into things), her fate would be much less kind if anyone knew who she was than it will be even as yet another nameless, faceless orphan in a Red Cross orphanage in World War II France.

It's actually a very good cross between light and dark. These children are, indeed, playing at the sacred in a way that others would deem profane. And Paulette does not get the ending she wants, a wish she probably shares with Michel. Things happen to these children, and it may well be heartbreaking--it is heartbreaking--but it's also hopeful. After all, while Paulette cannot get what she wants, to get anything halfway decent at all is better than nothing.