Jeux d’enfants

I did not expect Jeux d’enfants to do anything unusual to me.

I began the film without ceremony and spent the next hour and a half smoking one cigarette after another. When it ended, I stood up, moved around the room, and thought that was that.

About ten minutes later, I started crying.

Not because of Julien.

Not exactly because of Sophie.

The film had returned someone to me.

We had grown up together until I was about eleven. At that age, friendship rarely begins with a decision. A person simply belongs to the landscape: the same street, the same games, the same arguments, the same expectation that tomorrow will repeat enough of today to feel permanent.

Children do not understand how temporary ordinary life is.

Then my father was transferred and we moved.

There was no final scene worthy of a film. No carefully written goodbye. Childhood continued in another place, which is how many important endings occur: disguised as logistics.

New schools, new friends, university, work and different cities accumulated. Life is excellent at adding things quickly enough that you do not notice what it has removed. Eventually I no longer knew where she lived, what she was doing, or what kind of adult had grown out of the child I remembered.

Then Jeux d’enfants gave memory a face.

Julien and Sophie have their game, Cap ou pas cap?—dare or not dare? As children they create a private world with rules of their own. The difficulty begins when adulthood arrives but the game keeps demanding loyalty to its old logic. Pride, desire and fear enter something that once belonged to childhood.

While watching, I stopped following only their story.

I began remembering ours.

There is a special intimacy in childhood friendships because neither person has yet assembled a finished identity. You know one another before careers, adult manners, ambitions and the stories people later learn to tell about themselves.

Years afterward, you may remember a person who no longer exists in exactly that form.

And they remember a version of you that has also disappeared.

When I wrote about the film that night, I ended with a sentence I believed completely:

Unfortunately, things like this don’t happen in real life.

Then I deleted the film.

I did not want to watch it again. Some films entertain us; others find a room we had forgotten and switch on the light.

Months later, Facebook performed one of the minor miracles it was becoming famous for in those years.

She found me.

My Sophie.

After all that time.

I returned to the old post on October 23, 2010 and changed one sentence.

The first version had said that things like this do not happen in real life.

The second said:

Unfortunately, in real life, you never know what will happen.

I still prefer the correction.

We declare stories finished because the alternative is exhausting. Someone belongs to the past. A city is gone. A period is over. Most of the time, that classification works.

Occasionally life ignores it.

The strange thing about memory is that it preserves people without asking whether they will ever return. For years, a child from one part of my life existed only in that private archive.

Then a film opened the file.

A few months later, real life added a page.

Films require endings.

Life is less disciplined.