Love Me If You Dare (film)
2003 film by Yann Samuell
Love Me If You Dare (French: Jeux d'enfants, lit. 'Children's Games') is a 2003 romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Yann Samuell. It stars Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard as best friends Julien Janvier and Sophie Kowalsky, who begin playing a game of dares as children and find themselves unable to stop as they grow older, even when the game threatens to destroy their lives.
An international co-production between France and Belgium, the film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on 29 August 2003. It was released theatrically in France by Mars Distribution on 17 September 2003 and in Belgium by Cinéart on 24 September 2003. It was a box office success in France and sold over one million tickets.
Plot
When eight-year-old Julien Janvier goes to catch the school bus one morning, he finds classmate Sophie Kowalsky being bullied by their classmates for being Polish. To cheer Sophie up, Julien gives her a small tin box with a merry-go-round on it, a gift from his terminally ill mother. Because it is important to him, he asks her to lend it back to him from time to time. When Sophie demands proof of how important it is to Julien, he disengages the handbrake of the school bus filled with children, sending it rolling down the street. They then create their own game of dares: whenever one of them is in possession of the box, the other must complete a dare.
“Love Me If You Dare (film)” enters the record as 2003 film by Yann Samuell. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Love, Dare and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q371278. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 5 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Love Me If You Dare (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.