Set in rural France during WWII, this small film is heartbreakingly beautiful. This story involves the friendship between an orphaned five-year-old Parisian girl and a country farmer's ten-year-old son, whose family takes her in after her parents are killed on the road out of town. Those early scenes of the war and destruction are really well done, the sense of terror and fear as the city-dwellers run for their lives in droves. Once we are introduced to the little girl, she mesmerizes.
The friendship between the girl and the boy is well presented. He treats her like a princess and feels that since he found her in the fields, he is her keeper. The rural French farm life is meticulously is presented. It is a surprise how poor the farmers are, involved in nothing but petty neighborhood rivalry, superstitions, and living the life of extreme poverty.
At the heart of the film is a symbolism: the girl and the boy start to collect crosses in their own private cemetery. The idea first is to build a cemetery for her dead parents but then it expands to adding any dead being, insects, birds and critters. By the climax of the movie, the boy dedicated to satisfying the girl's childish wishes, robs the town's actual cemetery of actual crosses. That then reveals their private game to others and ends it as well. As their game expanded and evolved and multiplied, I could not shake the feeling that the symbolism of the children making their own methods of dealing with the death and destruction of war was a bit forced. Yet, if you suspend your disbelief and allow the children to be the enigmatic beings that they are, this a fine film which portrays how it is just these little games which sustain us all.
