Love Me If You Dare [DVD] [2004] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

What begins as a game played by two children escalates into a game of childish dares which can either be seen as outlandish, outrageous tragedy, or as an existential comedy in which two young people grow into adulthood steadfastly refusing to be confined by the social identities demanded of them by both convention and normative sensibilities.

Julien is facing the extinction of his family and identity when his mother is discovered to be terminally ill. His friend, Sophie, is meanwhile being subjected to racist abuse (she's Polish), and is enduring a home life which is less than an idyll. Robbed of the innocence of childhood, the pair feel they are damned as outsiders.

They retaliate by indulging in an escalating campaign of dares, each seeking to force the other to renege from the challenge. This is extreme roleplay: it is Luke Rhinehart's 'Dice Man' taken to an exponential degree, for their actions are not random, but personally contrived and obligated, and therefore beyond the bounds of probability.

Julien and Sophie rule one another's lives. No one else has any control over them. They are, and they remain, outcasts. But, no matter how hard they strive to assert themselves in the face of the world and refuse to obey its rules, they cannot escape the rules of the game by which they create themselves. They are caught up in the very merry-go-round which symbolises their pact.

Writer and Director Yann Samuell's film is consciously cynical and aims to shock ... or at least confuse its audience. The actions of the couple are comic, frightening, disquieting. There's a part of all of us which wants to step outside the boundaries, which admires the maverick, the spontaneous, the dissenter, the eccentric, even the lunatic; but there's an even larger part which is terrified of attracting the wrong attention and being stared at. It's that nightmare of being naked in class.

We each need to belong, to have a reference group to which we subscribe and to whose rules we adhere. So what happens if the reference group is only two people and they have the power to unmake the rules as they go along? Samuell wrote the story after his in-laws were killed by a speeding driver who had decided to randomly crash his car into an oncoming vehicle; it happened to be the one containing two people dear to Samuell. How do you go on being rational in life after something beyond the bounds happens?

These are the sorts of questions 'Jeux d'Enfants' poses. The acting is excellent - young Sophie (played by Joséphine Lebas-Joly) is outstanding. You can believe in the insane dynamic in which the characters find themselves. Comic book images and montages are shuffled together with more conventional editing and narrative techniques to create that distant-from-reality atmosphere - hence the comparison with 'Amelie'.

But this is not a gentle film, nor a heart warming one. These are not characters with whom you can unreservedly sympathise. For each laugh there is a parallel disturbing moment, moments when you feel gut-wrenching embarrassment, even anger. It is not a film which everyone will enjoy. It is certainly not a film which everyone will like. It is certainly a film many will loathe. But it's entertaining, it's thought provoking, and it's a film you really should see ... if only because of its ironic mockery of narrative convention and the nature of the love story.