(Film #39 out of 50 in our Criterion box set.) You might think that a movie featuring an adorable tiny blonde orphan moppet would be cloying, but that would just mean that you've been exposed to the wrong adorable tiny blonde orphan moppet movies.
This one is French, so, let's just say, it doesn't pull any punches. But don't get any ideas from the vaguely risqué title, this is strictly G-rated, except for, you know, all the death. That's not a spoiler: the beginning sequence of the film is her getting orphaned, and perhaps even more upsetting, having her puppy killed at the same time (and it's a very disturbing death, complete with twitching as if its back is broken) by German fighter planes firing on a caravan of cars and horse-drawn carts fleeing Paris in 1940. The Germans make several passes: on the first, everyone flees the bridge on foot and takes cover in fields by the side of the road. However, when our family returns to their car it won't re-start, so it is brutally shoved off the road by the people behind. The family are trying to flee on foot when the Germans return. The puppy runs, the little girl (Paulette) runs after him, the parents after her and they all throw themselves to the floor, and all but her are raked with bullets. This is incredibly upsetting: she is lying next to her dead mother and strokes her face (and then her own, as if for contrast - an action we see her repeat later). Then she picks up the spasming puppy and trots off, until a quarreling couple roughly scoop her up onto their cart and the unkind woman takes the now-dead puppy and hurls it into the river. Again she runs after it but has to follow the river downstream until she arrives at a ford where she can retrieve her dead puppy.
At this point she is on the land of a farm family, the Dollés, and she is found by the youngest son of the family, Michel, who is in hot pursuit of a loose cow. These two quickly become inseparable, and Michel ensures that Paulette is taken in by the Dollés (who are soon to lose their eldest son to a kick from a horse that had been part of the caravan out of Paris but bolted after the shooting, the doctors being unavailable to see him because they were tending to the victims). Then, for the rest of the film, the war recedes, the only sign of it is the return of the eldest son (played by a very interesting character, quite outside of acting) of the neighboring family, the Gouards (with whom they have a long-running feud), who has deserted from his regiment to return to his sweetheart (the eldest Dollé daughter, much to the displeasure of both patriarchs). But most of the film is taken up with feuding between the Dollé and Gouard families and the good-natured Michel's attempts to build an animal cemetery to help Paulette come to terms with death.
This involves a lot of cross-thievery, which is part of what pours petrol on the smoldering embers of the feud, as père Dollé is convinced the Gouards are behind it.
Only the (sympathetically portrayed) parish priest knows better, thanks to Michel's confession (shortly before a bold attempt to steal the cross from the altar). This all builds to a head at a cemetery visit to the recent grave of the oldest Dollé son and a slapstick fight between both fathers in an open grave.
However, the Priest does not keep the sanctity of the confessional and Michel has to go into hiding. Eventually his father catches up with him just as gendarmes are seen approaching the Dollé farm and the father assumes he's in trouble for the stolen crosses (some of which were taken from an actual people cemetery) and is chasing Michel around kicking him, demanding the return of the crosses, as Paulette watches in tears, but it transpires they are there for another reason. I defy anyone not to get moist-eyed at the end. Overall this film is a little miracle - clear-eyed and unsentimental, alternately charming and devastating (the closest comparison I can think of is Kes). Everyone in it is perfect, but Paulette is quite possibly the most affecting child actor I've ever seen. (The actress is Brigitte Fossey, and I'm happy to say she's still kicking. She made a few more films as a child and then left acting to, among other things, study philosophy and work as an interpreter, only to return later and appear as Paul Newman's wife in one film.)
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