Jeux d’enfants: ‘Sophie, c’est ma meilleure copine!’
‘You didn’t sleep with your mum, never killed your dad; and now at 25, you’re begging instead of living.’ says Sophie to Julien to save him from passing the point of no return in the extraordinary toxic tale, Jeux d’enfants written and directed by Yann Samuell.
Jeux d’enfants had been my favorite movie back in high school. Not because of the pure love it offers, because of its two damaged characters’ pushing each other to the edge, sometimes literally, by challenging the other to do the most intolerable and unexpected things that would lead the adults to despair. Things that their ridiculousness are beyond dispute, but the reaction of the adults are not helpful either. I had always been a kid who needed a push to act on the things I wanted but could not bring myself into actually doing them. I loved this movie so much to the point that, back then, the nickname I got on literally every social media was julienjanvier, which is the name of the male lead.
Julien, played by Thibault Verhaeghe & Guillaume Canet, is a kid who is confronted with his mother’s cancer and deals with it by escaping reality of the situation. He meets Sophie, played by Joséphine Lebas-Joly & Marion Cotillard, in front of the school bus while she is being bullied by other kids. Their first encounter changes both of them drastically. By lending the merry go round box to Sophie, Julien tries to cheer her up, and to show her how much he wants the box back, and actually to make her feel not alone, he starts the engine of the bus with the bus driver outside and the kids inside. Thus, their toxic game begins.
The game is accompanied by La vie en Rose, which means ‘life seen through happy lenses’ as Julien wears his 3d glasses and imagines Sophie and himself set against the God figure school principal, who is the equivalent to literally all adults in the actual world. When asked what he would be when he grows up, ‘a tyrant’ he says playfully, adding ‘with a harem of slaves and torture.’ Being an only child in a middle-class French family, his coping mechanism against his mother’s terminal illness becomes a playground in which he designs the set of rules. Little did he know, the other player, Sophie, is not a soft touch.
Sophie lives with her family in HLM (habitations à loyer modéré), subsidized homes for those whose income is below a certain level. The history of these houses goes way back into the 18th century, with the buildings dedicated to house workers. After World War II, a woman’s freezing on the street has been told to be a wakeup call for France and a turning point in housing policy. HLMs become houses of the families of workers coming to France in the 1960s and 1970s under the industrialization policies of France. Soon, the buildings begin to deteriorate, and government initiates policies to help subsidize the cost of a person’s rent to make housing more affordable. During the 1980s, the age of neo-liberalization, buying a house becomes popular and these buildings start to symbol poverty and violence. However, starting in the 2000s, everything’s back to square one. With the real estate prices go through the roof, demand for the public housing increases. Generically located on the outskirts of big cities, next to industrial zones, these houses consist mostly of immigrants, and underprivileged families, who have been facing discrimination among other difficulties in France. Now, where is l’égalité in this?
Beside living in HLM, with a Polish last name ‘Kowalsky’, Sophie faces xenophobia of other children. Somehow, I did not understand the severity of this situation even though I had seen this movie who knows how many times and dozens of other movies about racism. I guess, the fine line between xenophobia and racism might be the reason why. To this day, differences between them are largely discussed, deepened by social and economic inequalities. Bullies’ calling Sophie names are followed by the school principal’s emphasis on ‘vulgarity’ and her last name ‘Kowalsky’ when he complains about her misbehavior to her big sister. Years later, during an exam, one of her teachers’ repeatedly mispronouncing her name is another form of xenophobia, to an extent that it might be considered as a structural racism.
Since her childhood, Sophie has been made aware of the world around her. At first, she hesitates when Julien asks her what she would be when she grows up, then she answers ‘a flan.’ ‘A flan with apricots or even plain.’ Even then she knows the injustices between gender, social class and race. So, by choosing to become ‘a flan’ deep inside, she is actually hoping eventually to be liked by everyone. She quickly realizes that Julien is not as realistic as she is, in fact, he is far from that, dreaming in color. Knowing that, even when they are children, the look in her eyes have some form of compassion and concern for him.
As they grow up, Sophie tries to prepare him to the real world, but Julien’s not being as strong as her and issues with his dad cause him not to comprehend differences between their game and reality. Sophie cannot help trying to lead Julien away from the irreversible decision he is about to make, when he’s about to say yes at the altar to marry the woman he is not in love with. She asks him to say ‘non’ and finally take matters into his own hands by reminding him of his biggest problem: His Oedipus complex. The look she gives Julien at this moment bears a resemblance to the look she gives him at his mother’s funeral. However, Julien, having gotten bluntness from his father, and being rejected by him, blames Sophie for everything that went wrong in his life to a point that he seriously attempts to kill her. Knowing their relationship is not over, or insisting on their relationship not to be over, Sophie gives Julien some time, a decade, to be exact. Ten years later, Sophie is married to a football player with a promising future to secure her own comfort, living a life not so different from reality shows, and still longs for Julien. Whereas Julien has become a tyrant he dreamt of as a kid, only the one that doesn’t enslave anyone but himself, and finds himself trapped in the box he didn’t think he would be put into. He gets bored to death in his monotonous life and yearns for an alternative reality to turn it all around. Just when his willing to live starts to crumble, through their shared merry go round box sent by Sophie, he gains hope in continuing to fight for a better life, a colorful one.
