What emerged in the end is part ultra-modern cartoon fairy-tale, part bold psychological probe into the games we play in life and love. The tale starts, as many classic fairytales do, with two unhappy children. Julien is endlessly energetic and precociously brilliant, but unable to bear the impending heartbreak of his beloved mother’s death. Sophie is wildly imaginative, mischievous and determined to be different, yet in search of someone to accept and love her. When they meet one another, everything changes. They begin what seems to be a child’s momentary amusement. Every time they exchange a symbolic tin box (a gift to Julien from his mother), the one who takes the toy also has to take a dare. The pranks they force one another to play range from talking dirty in class to crashing a wedding buffet – cake included - but each one becomes a little bigger, a little more irreverent, a little riskier than the last.

Soon, the game has become something far larger and more thrilling than the sad and disappointing world around them. Despite the constant trouble they get into, Julien and Sophie cannot stop the game’s mad, wild and often destructive rush. When Julien’s mother passes away, leaving him bereft, the game is the only thing that continues to matter.

Even when they go off to college, the game continues, progressing into more difficult, bizarre and often crueler challenges, each and every new dare seemingly a way for Julien and Sophie to drive one another further away, to avoid admitting they are crazily in love with one another. The harder they compete with one another, the less they are able to communicate their emotions.

When they finally reach adulthood – Julien growing more serious, Sophie even more of a libertine -- the uncompromising, child-like nature of the game comes into question. Now Julien and Sophie must choose between the game and their careers, between the game and their spouses-to-be, between the game and the conventions of everyday life. Yet . . . how can they resist? Just when they think it’s all over and life has become banal, the game is afoot again, and they realize they want it to go on and on, without end. It might have taken them a lifetime to say “I love you” but Julien and Sophie manage in their own inimitable style to capture the moment forever…or do they?

For Yann Samuell, Julien and Sophie’s surreal game is the very essence of love, which can be at once playful and freeing, while also filled with lunacy and destruction. He also sees it as a story of two people searching for a kind of pure and primal freedom beyond the structures of banal, everyday existence. “I see the story as being about two people who dare to live a life different than what is expected of them, who don’t care what the world thinks is the correct way to behave,” he explains. “At first, I was a bit afraid that some might think I was condoning this kind of bad behavior. But it is a fantasy, a cartoon, a fairy tale, and I wanted to dare to tell this story because I think what arises from it most is a different view of the euphoria and joy to be found in life.”

As a study of game-playing in all its facets – light and dark – the film is also a reflection of how the intense ecstasies and fantasies of childhood haunt us, tempt us and call to us in our adult lives, even as we face mature relationships and grown-up ambitions. “I had in mind the Nietzsche quote in which he says: ‘man’s maturity is to regain the seriousness he had as a child at play,’” says the director. “I adore childhood, but that being said, I don’t think there’s very much else we take more seriously in the world than sharing love. I don’t believe Sophie and Julien suffer from the ‘Peter Pan Syndrome,’ as Americans say. They don’t remain children forever. They take on their lives. It’s just that they try to keep the game alive throughout.”

Does the game ultimately destroy or save its players? Samuell concludes his film on a surprising, poetic note – a literal concretizing of his character’s feelings as they are solidified in a moment of pure bliss -- that lends itself to multiple interpretations, from the romantic to the tragic. He explains the way he sees it: “Julien and Sophie’s story ends in a sort of grand finale in which love and death appear to be united. Do they really die? I don’t know! I think of the end as not so much a death as another stage, another test of their love. Their goal is to be together forever, and in some sense they find a happiness without end. But you can see this in different ways: if you want to see it as a tragedy, it is a tragedy, and if you want to see it as a happy ending, it is that, too.”