La regola del gioco

Jean Renoir said that this was not intended to be a social commentary, and whether he truly intended it to be (he referred to it as, "An exact description of the bourgeoisie of our time.") or not, it is hard to dismiss that it hit close to home. So offended were the masses that the picture was banned. It is said that behind every joke there is truth, and whether this was intended to be a joke or not, Renoir still found truth. One could argue the director's intentions all day, but one matter that cannot be disputed is that this film is extraordinary! As a handful of French men and women converge on a château for a hunting expedition, their love affairs clash with their obligations to society's game. For instance, one cannot leave one's lover to be with another until he has confessed his adultery to her. Attempts to leave with another man's wife are particularly difficult, as well, unless the other man has a mistress of his own. These are but a few rules of the game. The old are for the old, the young are for the young. Members of one social order are forbidden to see members from another, and so on. Combine these rules with a tangled web of countless love affairs between a handful of people, and you can see the madness that erupts during the course of this movie. The parts are all played well, but it is the writing and directing of Renoir that makes the film the masterpiece that it is. Keeping all of these sordid affairs in order is an achievement in its own right, but Renoir moves his pieces all over the board like a skilled chess player, achieving his goal while never forgetting the rules of the game!

I'm sure that pretty much anyone who decides to watch this film will be aware of it's status among many critics as one of the greatest films ever made. It may not be exactly that, but it is still a very good movie.

The basic story involves a group of wealthy French aristocrats getting together for a weekend's hunting party at a country chateau just before the start of World War 2. However it's not long before the guests, their hosts and the servants are involved in some complex romantic problems.

The film is beautifully made. Every shot is perfectly well composed and filmed. The film's director, Jean Renoir, was the son of the famous Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, and Jean Renoir certainly had a good painter's eye himself.

The film depicts a world of casual cruelty and betrayal hidden behind it's polite and civilised facade. Everyone has to play by the iron-bound social rules ("the rules of the game") and those who don't, suffer for it.

Cynical, but often very amusing, this film provoked riots when it premiered in France in a severely shortened form. It exists in various different lengths. The version I saw was a restored 110 minute version on DVD.

This is a film that will not be to all tastes, but it is required viewing for all fans of French cinema or for anyone interested in the history of world cinema.

A weekend party assembles at the château of the Marquis de la Chesnaye. Among the guests André, an aviator, is in love with the Marquis's wife, Christine; the Marquis himself is conducting an affair with Geneviève; Octave, an old family friend, is also secretly in love with the Marquise. Meanwhile a poacher, appointed servant by the mischievous Marquis, comes to blows with the gamekeeper over the latter's flirtatious wife.

The set-up may remind one of The Shooting Party or Gosford Park, but the debt is naturally in the present film's favour. Rather, the upstairs-downstairs intrigue, the mingling of comedy with drama, and the setting prior to cataclysmic social/political change owe much to Beaumarchais's Le mariage de Figaro. Which explains the hostility of audiences and government alike on the film's release; it was cut, then banned outright, and not reconstituted until well into the 1950s.

To tap the source of the disquiet aroused by this superficially fluffy piece of bedroom farce ('Surely just the French doing what they do best?'), one must look beyond the typical observation that it was 'socially insidious because it was a clear attack on the haute-bourgeoisie, the very class who would shortly lead the troops against the Germans'. The auto-critique goes deeper than that.

Consider. The lower orders are no better than their irresponsible masters: the women are no less immoral, the men just as concerned to preserve their foreheads from cuckoldry. This is the culmination of Figaro's contract with the Count: he enjoins the latter to behave like an honest man, as befits his station; two centuries later, not only has the nobility welshed on the deal, it has brought the servant classes down with it. Renoir serves up for the French a portrait of a society which is rotten from top to bottom. 'The Rules of the Game' are: keep up appearances, and somehow the whole charade will be preserved indefinitely (barring Adolf and his Panzers, that is).

André, the aviator, the crosser of the Atlantic (distance, perspective), is the one who threatens the edifice. Being Christine's lover is not enough; she must elope with him, it must be 'honest'. If she does this she will be showing that feelings matter more than money and position. The choice is too much for her and she runs for cover with Octave, and thus sets in motion the mechanism by which everything ends in tragedy but the status quo is maintained, for now.

The working out of this theme in Renoir's hands leads to some striking juxtapositions of tone. Renoir the 'humanist', like Octave whom he plays, was a lover, and forgiver, of humanity. It was not in him to condemn without affection. In one scene the gamekeeper chases his rival through the drawing room discharging a pistol, while the guests barely look up from their cards: he is merely playing by the rules, after all. It was perhaps the coexistence of farcical sequences like this with the wanton slaughter of wildlife in the hunt scene that audiences found hard to take. Renoir himself wrote: 'During the shooting of the film I was torn between my desire to make a comedy of it and the wish to tell a tragic story. The result of this ambivalence was the film as it is.' Amen.

THE RULES OF THE GAME takes place on the eve of World War II at an aristocratic house party at an opulent chateau on a country estate just outside of Paris where the overlapping ‘affaires d'amour' of all social classes are observed with a keen and compassionate eye. Renoir looks to the eighteenth-century world of commedia dell'arte and Mozartian opera, and seamlessly integrates farce with tragedy, using a classical form to offer his audience a profound and multifaceted parable on the disturbing realities that underlie the veneer of contemporary French society, and which are themselves symptomatic of the nascent decline of Old World Europe.

The film opens with the arrival of a middle-class aviator, André Jurieu (Roland Toutain), who violates the unwritten `rules' of social propriety by declaring to a radio reporter his disappointment that the woman he had been courting, Christine de la Chesnaye (Nora Grégor), is not present at his reception after completing a record-breaking flight across the Atlantic. His apparent indiscretion of making public his private feelings to high society diminishes his initially heroic stature and his skill with the advanced technology of aircraft is not matched by an ability to deal with people, particularly in matters of love. His careless and unmediated show of desire for a highborn lady not only transgresses the received law of proper social conduct but of traditional class distinctions as well. André's reckless pursuit of his desire, of what he could not have, caused him to behave as one beneath his class in order to rise above his station, and in the end, he was destroyed by the overlapping desire and misguided frustration of yet another man of even lesser social status and refinement. The final killing of André is echoed in Alain Resnais' LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961), when we see the mysterious `M' (Sascha Pitoëff) dispatch `X' (Giorgio Albertazzi) with a shotgun for apparently having cuckolded him with `A' (Delphine Seyrig) the year before.

Renoir's approach to mise-en-scène is especially groundbreaking. He employs seamless cutting as well as long continuous takes and tracking shots which follow characters as the move from one space to the next in a manner that anticipates the graceful circling, panning, sensuously kinetic camera of Welles, Ophüls, Godard, Resnais, Bertolucci and others. He uses deep-focus compositions, avoiding close-ups by putting many actors in the frame at the same time to suggest multiple viewpoints. The balustrades of La Colinière and the languorous tracking shots down the long corridors undoubtedly inspired those in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD while the checkered floor suggests a harlequinade and a chess board upon which the characters maneuver themselves in relation to each other -- like the similarly checkered shuffleboard floor in Antonioni's LA NOTTE (1961) or the geometrically precise arrangement of the garden in MARIENBAD. (Interestingly enough, Coco Chanel designed the costumes for both THE RULES OF THE GAME and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD.) Like Antonioni, Renoir frames characters in architectural space, juxtaposing interior and exterior space, such as when the guests arrive at the chateau and a curtain of rain in the foreground obscures their indoor activities. Renoir's fast-moving tracking shots during the rabbit massacre are imitated in Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY with the camera ominously winding its way through the trenches of World War I. These kinds of tracking shots also serve to keep the film from becoming talky and static and to de-emphasize the importance of the dialogue in the cinematic narrative, reducing the interplay of voices to a mere din of savory ‘bon mots' and constant stream of overlapping background chatter.

Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), Christine's husband, is fascinated with antique mechanical toy birds and other such gadgets and this fixation suggests an ambivalence toward nineteenth-century Positivism and how an abstract, theoretical, or scientific approach to life alienates people from the actual, spontaneous, concrete experience. In a way, Robert recalls von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) forever tending to his geranium in Renoir's previous film, GRAND ILLUSION (1937), as well as the character anticipates Steiner (Alain Cuny) in LA DOLCE VITA, who derives more aesthetic pleasure from listening to tape-recorded sounds of nature than hearing the real thing or `M' in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, who prefers to continuously play God in an inscrutable matchstick game which only he can win -- with the rules of the game known only to him -- instead of dealing with messy, unpredictable human relationships.

As an aristocratic Jew, Robert de la Chesnaye could be a composite of Dalio's rich young mercantile Jew, Rosenthal, and the generous, self-sacrificing French nobleman, De Boeldieu, in GRAND ILLUSION. When a chef makes an anti-Semitic slight against Robert, revealing the bigotry of the French working classes, it evokes the controversy surrounding the Dreyfuss Affair. The General's final comment that Robert is one of a `dying breed' not only heralds the decay of aristocratic privilege but, in from the vantage point of hindsight, also seems a chilling spectre of the Holocaust. Christine's Austrian origin alludes to the looming war with Germany and seems a prediction of France's collaboration under the Vichy régime. The indiscriminate destruction of life in the rabbit and pheasant hunt sequence forecasts the waste and destruction of the war to come.

Robert's comment that he `does not want any fences' separating people seems to indicate the gradual dissolution of the old class systems and nationalistic loyalties, and indeed, of all the traditional illusions about human nature and civilization that are to be swept away by the war. The most cryptic sign is the penultimate ‘danse macabre,' echoed in the séance and ritual journey to the realm of the dead in LA DOLCE VITA, suggesting that Renoir's superficial roundelay in THE RULES OF THE GAME is really a dance of death heralding the apocalyptic destruction of the old Europe.

There's a food chain where the top is filled with crass, it's the opposite of cream, more septic mass, quite immoral and corrupt, degenerate and so abrupt, they have their rules, behave like mules, with necks of brass. You'd like to think these folk, had long since gone, but they're more common in today, so you'd be wrong, like leaches sucking blood, symbolically, they're all deadwood, but their claws are buried deep, so they hang on.

The decadent lives of those who have found themselves fat with inherited wealth and power, and the disdain they and their hangers on have for the rest of society in a world that still exists today.