Jeux Interdits

Clément's notorious eclecticism can surely never have been so marked within a single film as in this all-purpose allegory, anti-war tract and noir-ish morality. Waifish children create their own secret animal cemetery and honour it with the monuments of the human dead, while World War II holocaust and petty family feuds form a perverse backdrop to their 'innocence' - or, perhaps, a mirror to the 'perversion' of their forbidden games. Unfortunately, such a potentially fascinating patchwork is glossed over with an irritating layer of heartstring humanism, and now looks 'touching' rather than challenging.