Jeux d’enfants

I don’t know how I managed not to watch Jeux d’enfants until last night.

I did not choose it because somebody had strongly recommended it. I did not know that I was about to discover one of those films that suddenly opens a door to a part of your life you thought you had forgotten.

I simply thought:

Let’s see what this is.

Then I sat there for an hour and a half.

I did not get up.

I just watched.

And smoked one cigarette after another.

When the film ended, nothing happened at first.

Then, about ten minutes later, I started crying.

Not really because of Julien.

Not really because of Sophie.

Because the film had reminded me of my Sophie.

Of course, that was not her real name.

But after watching the film, I could not think of her in any other way.

We had grown up together until I was about eleven years old.

At that age you do not think very much about how temporary things can be.

Someone is simply there.

You play together.

You argue.

You laugh.

You see each other again the next day.

And because you are a child, you quietly assume that tomorrow will continue forever.

Then one day it doesn’t.

My father was transferred.

We moved.

And childhood did what childhood always does.

It continued somewhere else.

Years passed.

New schools.

New friends.

University.

Work.

Different cities.

Different people.

Life keeps adding things so quickly that you do not always notice what it has taken away.

Eventually, I did not even know where she was.

That sounds strange when I write it now.

There was once a person who was part of almost every ordinary day of my childhood, and years later I did not know which city she lived in, what she was doing, or what kind of person she had become.

She existed only in memory.

Then I watched Jeux d’enfants.

Julien and Sophie have their game.

Cap ou pas cap?

Dare or not dare?

As children, everything feels possible.

The world has not yet explained to them how people are supposed to behave.

They have their own rules.

Their own language.

Their own little universe.

Then they grow older.

That is where the game becomes something else.

The childish challenges remain, but childhood does not.

Life becomes more complicated.

People leave.

People return.

Pride appears.

Love appears.

Fear appears.

And suddenly the easiest thing in the world — telling another person what you actually feel — becomes almost impossible.

While watching them, I stopped seeing only the film.

Memories started appearing.

Small things.

Things I had probably not thought about for years.

I remembered what it was like to have someone in your childhood whom you never consciously decided to become friends with.

They were simply there.

There was no beginning to remember.

And because there was no real beginning, perhaps you never imagined an ending either.

That is one of the cruelties of childhood.

You do not know when something is happening for the last time.

The last game.

The last walk home.

The last argument.

The last ordinary afternoon.

Nobody tells you:

Pay attention.

You will remember this thirty years from now.

When my father’s job took us away, there was no dramatic movie scene.

No great promise.

No carefully written goodbye.

Life simply changed direction.

That was all.

Maybe this is why Jeux d’enfants affected me so much.

It made me think about the people who belong completely to one period of our lives.

Sometimes we lose them because of an argument.

Sometimes because of a decision.

And sometimes nobody does anything wrong.

A family moves.

A school ends.

A job begins.

A city changes.

One day you suddenly realize that a person who once knew almost everything about your daily life has become someone whose life you know nothing about.

When I wrote about the film that night, I ended with a simple conclusion:

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

It felt true.

Films are allowed to make circles.

People disappear and return.

Childhood promises survive decades.

Coincidences wait patiently for the right scene.

Real life seemed less interested in completing its stories.

So I deleted the film.

I genuinely did not want to watch it again, even accidentally.

Once was enough.

Some films are enjoyable to revisit.

Some films touch a place you would rather leave closed.

I thought that was the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

Months later, something happened that made my final sentence look rather foolish.

Facebook did what Facebook was becoming surprisingly good at doing in those years.

It connected people who had disappeared from each other’s lives long before the Internet became part of everyday life.

She found me.

My Sophie.

After all those years.

When I returned to the entry on October 23, 2010, I added an edit.

The first time I had written:

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

The second time I had to change it:

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

I still like that correction.

Maybe even more than the film.

Because we spend a lot of time pretending that we understand how our lives work.

We decide that something is over.

That somebody belongs to the past.

That a door has closed.

That a story did not have the ending we wanted.

Most of the time, perhaps we are right.

But sometimes life keeps writing after we have already put the full stop on the page.

Jeux d’enfants reminded me of someone I had lost somewhere between childhood and adulthood.

For one night, that was painful enough to make me wish I had never watched the film.

A few months later, life gave the story one more sentence.

Not necessarily a happy ending.

Not necessarily an unhappy one.

Just another sentence.

And maybe that is better.

Because films need endings.

Life doesn’t.