Rules
of the Game (1939)
(aka
La Regle du jeu)
"It's
a war film, and yet there is no reference to the war.
Beneath it's seemingly innocuous appearance the story
attacks the very structure of our society. Yet all I
thought about at the beginning was nothing avant-garde
but a good little orthodox film. People go to the cinema
in hopes of forgetting their everyday problems, and
it was precisely their own worries that I plunged them
into... The truth is that they recognized themselves.
People who commit suicide do not care to do it
in front of witnesses.
- Jean Renoir
"My Life and My Films"
Long considered one of the greatest films of all time,
"Rules of the Game" is an interestingly constructed
indictment of the upper class brought to us by Jean
Renoir. The film juxtaposes the affluent against their
supposed inferiors, their servants, and ends up showing
us the only difference between them is in how they view
life. The rich are shown to be heartless in their inability
to even understand the basic value of life. Meanwhile,
the servant's existence seems to be only their joy in
serving their supposed betters. And that is the true
rub. While the rich are shown as pompous, boring, and
too bilious to even understand any basic human emotion
or how it works, the servants are shown to feel inferior
to them. Their existence is belittled because they put
so much importance on the existence of the ridiculous
wealthy.
Renoir shows all of this with the subtlety of a butter
knife going through water. The most amazing aspect of
the film is his use of game hunting to visually solidify
his feelings toward the wealthy. This segment, midway
through the film, is meticulously shot and edited. And
the climax of the scene, where an endless parade of
small wild animals and birds are shot and killed is
sickening and deadly stagnant. It's documentary feel
can surely only mean that animals were shot and killed
for real in this segment. If this was mildly shocking
by the standards in 1939, it is horrifying by today's
sensibilities. And Renoir does all of this not only
to show the disregard for life the rich have but also
to act as foreshadowing for a scene that will come in
the film's final reel.
In French with subtitles, the film has Renoir playing
an important supporting role himself. The man is much
more rotund and rhapsodic than one would expect. And
while he is the only interesting looking character in
the cast, it is always easy to keep his character straight.
What is even more interesting and exceptional is that
it is relatively easy to keep all the characters straight
with little thought. And although their names mean nothing
to American audiences, I will include them anyway. Renoir
presents myriad love triangles and numerous plots and
subplots of romantic entanglements in the film. Since
the film is mainly set at a party at a country estate,
and includes a costume ball, it is remarkable that one
can keep track of all that goes on. The characters include
Renoir as Octave, an old friend of Christine (Nora Gregor),
a conductor's daughter who has married above her station
to Robert (Marcel Dalio). While Robert has no problem
with his affairs with both Genevieve (Mila Parley) and
Christine's niece Jackie (Anne Meyen), she is troubled
by a small misunderstanding with an aviator Andre Jurieux
(Roland Toutain) which makes many think they are having
an affair. Meanwhile, Andre is in fact in love with
her. This is contrasted by a love triangle within the
servant's hemisphere which has Christine's maid Lisette
(Paulette Dubost) making eyes at her husband's sworn
enemy Marcel the Poacher (Julien Carette). Lisette's
makes her husband Schumacher (Gaston Modot) so irate,
he actually takes after Marcel with a pistol. And this
is the contradistinction between the two classes, and
why the film is called what it is. The rich consider
love much like the hunt, and both "games" have set "rules"
which must be adhered to. When Robert has a small reaction
to Andre's flirtations with Christine, he hits him and
then apologizes profusely for not playing within the
boundaries of the game. Such is their view of life and
love. But the servants have no shame in acting out a
cartoonish chase scene where Schumacher pursues Marcel
throughout the house with a pistol and eventually uses
it several times, in the end to a disastrous result.
They play a more true and heartfelt, emotion-filled,
game. Schumacher is so emotionally involved in what
is going on that he actually weeps at one point.
Renoir's film is full of emptiness and, eventually,
sorrow. The hollow existence of his rich characters
and their servants are signified by the huge mausoleum
like rooms in which they exist. Like Welles' "Citizen
Kane," Renoir uses space to denote the shallowness of
a life devoid of love and meaning. But Renoir does this
with less pretentiousness and less cinematic bombast
than Welles. And while Renoir may take the more subdued
road to his ultimate goal, it is no less important or
comprehendible in his work.
"Rules
of the Game" was a film released on the eve of World
War II. It signified the end of an era. The film even
ends with the monumentally significant statement that
these characters are a "vanishing breed." Things would
soon change. But upon it's release, the film was received
poorly and was reviled by critics and audiences alike.
Maybe it hit too close to home. Renoir reworked the
film several times, some of which is noted below, but
this did little to make the film acceptable and only
succeeded in making it more incomprehensible. It was
only in 1959, when the film was finally restored that
it began to be accepted and recognized as the
masterpiece it no doubt is. It is said that when it
was show in 1959, fully restored for the first time
after 20 years in shambles, a crew-member who
worked on the film viewed it and wept at the perfection
of the restoration to Renoir's original first
edit. And rightly so.
Note: Screenplay by Renoir, Camille Francois, Carl Koch,
Henry Cartier, and Andre Zwoboda. Koch and Francois
also had bit parts in the film. Koch and Zwoboda also
acted as Assistant Directors. Fracois also acted
as "Administrator" for the film.
Cinematography by Jean Bachelet. Costumes by Coco Chanel.
Edited by Marguerite Renoir (the Director's wife). Produced
by Claude Renoir (his nephew, whose father was actor
Pierre Renoir). Henri Cartier-Bresson also acted as
Assistant Director and played a small role.
Music includes pieces by Chopin, Mozart, Strauss, and
the credited scorer Roger Desormieres.
Renoir cut the film several times due to poor initial
reception and damage to negatives during WWII. Originally
released at 113 min it was recut due to political pressure
and public outcry and several versions circulated anywhere
from 80 to 110 minutes. In 1959, a restored version
was put together by French film historians under Renoir's
supervision. This is the version I saw and the one generally
available on video. This version is subtitled quite
well with even the songs and the poems in the film subtitled
in English. However, quite interestingly, there is one
small scene, where several gentleman dressed as what
appears to be Jews sing a short song that is not subtitled
at all.
Renoir prefaces the film with the message "This film
is intended as entertainment not social criticism."
Renoir wrote of the film in his memoirs, "My Life and
My Films." An excerpt concerning this film is
published in "Roger Ebert's Book of Film." Among the
thoughts, Renoir is bemused by the fact that he intended
to make a light-hearted comedy film, in which the viewer
might forget his problem. Yet he also discussses how
he felt life was "de-mystifyed" for him during his childhood
and it was these open eyes with which he viewed the
film.
Renoir's father was the artist Auguste Renoir.
Every ten years the British film magazine "Sight and
Sound" polls critics and film directors on their Top
10 list of the best films. They began in 1952. "Rules
of the Game" appears in several of these lists at the
following placment (Bote: in 1992, "Sight and Sound"
seperated critics from directors. "Citizen Kane" has
been #1 on the list since 1962. In 1952, "The Bicycle
Thief was #1).
1952: #10
1962: #3
1972: #2
1982: #2
1992: Critcs: #2
Directors: Not in Top 10
There is one gay character who is very minor but does
get in an obvious and non-derogatory line.
The Rules of the Game
DIRECTED BY: Jean Renoir
REVIEWED: 11-22-95 from the "Tuscon Weekly"
TALK ABOUT BEING ahead of one's time. Jean Renoir's
critically celebrated The Rules of the Game opened in
Paris in 1939 to a hail of venom and fury--audiences
jeered, spat and set fire to sheets of newspaper in
hopes of burning the theater down. The film--a funny,
ironic vision of the rich and their servants at play
in a country house--is now considered one of the great
masterpieces of cinema, but on the eve of the German
occupation, any criticism of French society was considered
unpatriotic. A half hour of footage was cut in hopes
of excising whatever it was audiences found so vile,
including major plot points, resulting in a truncated
version that didn't make sense. The public responded
with even more anger and bewilderment. Shortly after
it was released, The Rules of the Game was declared
"demoralizing" by the government and banned altogether.
To make matters worse, the master negative was destroyed
by bombing and the only prints left in existence after
the war were of the hopelessly butchered, shortened
version. A glimmer of Renoir's genius was visible nonetheless,
and interest slowly built in reconstructing the original.
A batch of out-takes was discovered and after two years
of editing with Renoir's help, a restored version of
The Rules of the Game, with only one or two variations
from the original, was released in 1959. It was instantly
hailed as a classic and is generally ranked as one of
the top ten films of all time. It's said that when one
of the original crew members saw it, he wept at the
sight of it restored.
Jean Renoir was the son of the impressionist painter
Auguste Renoir and his films show the same pure delight
in life and light as his father's paintings. The Rules
of the Game is his most pessimistic work, but it still
has the warmth and humanity that are a hallmark of all
his films. The story concerns three love triangles--two
among masters and one among servants.
Upstairs is the Marquis de la Chesnaye, a self-involved
but good-hearted man who's so out of it that his only
real passion is collecting mechanical birds. He's having
an affair with a vapid society girl; meanwhile, his
wife is being courted by an aviator who makes a solo
flight across the Atlantic to get her attention. The
romantic intrigue upstairs is mirrored by similar problems
among the servants downstairs. Everyone converges on
the Marquis' country house to do what the rich like
to do: play games. They play cards, they hunt, they
have parties and put on skits--all of life is a game.
They're so engrossed with frivolity and masquerade that
when the moment inevitably arrives for them to take
off their masks, no one knows what to do with themselves.
"It's a world where everyone lies," says Octave, a bumbling
fool and the only character with any perspective, a
role Renoir played himself.
Renoir pioneered the use of deep-focus photography,
a method of filmmaking that allowed actors to be seen
in relationship to each other and their surroundings
without cutting back and forth. So modest and transparent
is this technique that The Rules of the Game has an
almost documentary-like feel. There aren't a lot of
close-ups and people are often shown in groups. This
made it easier for the actors to improvise, and
the sense of realism and spontaneity Renoir achieved
is nothing short of miraculous.
There's almost no sense of artifice--these don't seem
to be characters in a movie but actual people living
their lives. Julien Carette is especially delightful
as Marceau, the rabbit poacher who's always wanted to
be a servant because he loves the clothes.
If all this hardly seems "demoralizing" by today's standards,
keep in mind that Renoir felt obliged to include a disclaimer
that read: "This film is intended as entertainment,
not as social criticism." Surely he was stretching the
truth a little bit. The Rules of the Game was originally
conceived as a critique of fascism in the guise of a
light comedy, and while the finished film rises above
simple polemics, Renoir certainly manages to criticize
a slew of social conditions, including the indolence
of the rich and the casual cruelty of men. The hunting
scene is especially chilling.
Like all great works of art, it's subtle and complex
and impossible to describe. You just have to see it.
It's a goddamn masterpiece, for chrissakes.
-- Stacey Richter
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