• Omar Moore of San Francisco
Long before Luis Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" there was Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game," a 1939 classic tragicomedy about French upper crust society and its lack of morals. Billed as a "dramatic fantasy," Renoir's sharp-eyed satire was far ahead of its time, and took no prisoners, throwing both caution and political correctness to the wind.
Though filmed in beautiful, timeless black and white, "The Rules of the Game"(La Regle Du Jeu) is arguably the most colorful film ever made. It bursts with energy and life. The film is a multifaceted look at the emotional boundaries and battlefields of love and forbidden passions between men and women. The sexes openly hunt each other like prey, discussing their strategies, targets, regrets and longings with each other and amongst themselves. Mr. Renoir crafts a riveting anthropology of these vacant and trifling human creatures. Each is tinged with irony. Few have time for self-awareness or reflection.
One exception is Octave, the lone introspective member of this ribald, licentious bunch. Octave is played by Mr. Renoir. His charm and playfulness are infectious for several married women at a hunting party in a mansion. Octave is wayward, clumsy and unpredictable, yet he's the moral conscience of the director's film. Octave often circumnavigates this Shakespearean passion play as the voice of reason on its stage. Additionally, two of the film's crucial characters are labeled a "poet" and an "angel", though "dangerous" nonetheless. The adjectives are accurate, due to the poetry and angelic moments that frame Mr. Renoir's social commentary.
Analogies are made between the hunting of animals for sport and the voracious hunt of the human animal for love. A hunting sequence offers the first clues: in the random hunt for love prey will be obvious and inevitable. The animal is repeatedly referenced as a character in "The Rules of the Game". Rabbits fight for their lives. One character wishes he could go down a hole so as not to discern the difference between right and wrong. Early on, a plane lands carrying a character named André Jurieu. He has just completed a transatlantic solo flight. Birds fall from the sky unsuccessfully trying to evade the rifles of hunters.
Though no child is seen in the film, children, or childlike delights are very much a part of the characters' milieu in "The Rules of the Game". One person describes children and the beauty of constantly looking after them as a "sole occupation" but is likely alluding instead to the thrill of obsession and the chase for a man who may be unobtainable. The analogy is apt, as many of the men and women in Mr. Renoir's film are child-like, both in their honesty and helplessness.
The hunting grounds of "The Rules of the Game" are literally brought close to home as the film slowly merges the game of love and the thrill of the hunt in grand, farcical style. There are layers. Open secrets exist among these people. Deeper secrets and desires are wielded like blunt force trauma to their intimate, captive audience of one.
Love's landscape is treacherous. Everyone is in love it seems, with at least two others. Sometimes three men pine for the same woman. At least two women have multiple lovers. One man has two. Other times people are in love with themselves while their philosophical speechifying suggests otherwise. Such narcissism and contradictions make "The Rules of the Game" scandalous and intriguing. The Greek chorus banter accompanying the farce on display is just as interesting, as is the music and amusing theatrics that serve as a secondary soundtrack.
On the surface the film's vital characters may be vacant but Mr. Renoir gives these sad, lonely figures nuanced backgrounds informing their tangled, complex histories with the sins and strengths of their parents. In documenting superficial people "The Rules of the Game" is a smart essay on behavior and foreshadowing. One of the fascinating things about some of the many players on this fragile chess board is that they will occasionally stop and self-correct -- even in the midst of emotional chaos -- and remind themselves that rules are very much the order of the day. This is often depicted in a cheery, breezy almost irrelevant manner.
"The Rules of the Game" caused a stir during its initial release in 1939, set prior to the onset of World War II. Mr. Renoir's scathing examination of unrestrained hedonism, hypocrisy, class and adultery made headlines. The film was originally one hour and 21 minutes in length, but following a bombing raid during the war, much of the original print was destroyed. In 1959 however, the film was reconstructed, with 25 minutes of previously unreleased footage added, to form a new 106-minute version of the film. Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand revived the film with the director's blessing. The 1959 version is the one the world is most familiar with. (An in-depth treatment of the film's reconstruction is provided on the Criterion Collection edition two-disc DVD of "The Rules of the Game," which I highly recommend.)
Cinematically, a shrewd orchestration of Mr. Renoir's excellent film lies in its contrast of humans with inanimate objects. In some scenes the director often frames actors touching or standing next to figurines both large and small to illustrate duplicity in their characters' dispositions or an evolutionary insignificance in the characters' very existence. The backdrop in two examples: a mildly offensive black figurine (widely collected in the 1930s) or Asian historical faces or artifacts, which two characters essentially pose with. Later in the film the symbolism is reflected in a musical menagerie featuring a quick glimpse of a picture of a small, naked lady.
"The Rules of the Game" also utilizes wide angle and long lens camera work to lend distance, remoteness, context and an irrelevance to the situations involving this ensemble of simpletons. The background in many scenes reveals a busy landscape with a constant dynamism and depth that keeps the film moving exuberantly.
Jean Renoir's film indicts the rich and their pathetic little affairs. Like all great satires "The Rules of the Game" maintains realism and a gravity that is sometimes painful and tragic, yet other times uproarious. The film spares no sacred cows. No nationality, racial, religious or ethnic group can take cover from the withering dialogue of Mr. Renoir's astutely observed screenplay highlighting ignorance and the ignoble. The script also looks at love across class lines and how those lines get crossed and the consequences of such transgressions.
Every time you watch "The Rules of the Game" you revel in it and discover something new. I've seen the film on a number of occasions and have enjoyed it differently on each one. I never tire of the lessons it teaches, the entertainment it provides, and the wonderful dialogue it showcases. Every word spoken is uttered for a reason. Mr. Renoir, the director of "Grand Illusion", provides a grand illusion of manners, rules and sincerity, coupled with a meaningful celebration of the wild, funny and mysterious ways of the human heart.
Omar Moore's website is www.popcornreel.com and he is on Twitter @popcornreel .The photograph at the top is by Richard Avedon.
The complete film is online on YouTube. Here is Part One:
I actually watched the complete film on Youtube, but the quality is spotty, especially if you wish for the picture to fit the whole screen. I am still amazed at the scene near the climax where Renoir follows three couples around the mansion, in real time, without losing sight of each thread, each character, as their love affairs and the consequences of their love affairs play out.
Anyway, thanks for this insightful review! It reminded me that I must seek out this film (and Grand Illusion) at my local library, in its Criterion format, once SIFF is over (and once I've seen Aguirre, the Wrath of God).
Ebert: That scene is an incredible accomplishment, done so naturally few people consciously notice it.
The Criterion of "Rules" is crisp and clear.
It's little wonder that this is the chief film that forever rivals Citizen Kane for the greatest film ever made. I first saw it about eight years ago and it literally took my breath away. What an extraordinary and wonderful film, one of the masterpieces that truly deserves the epithet.
Stanley Kubrick vs Martin Scorsese:
http://www.vimeo.com/12432238
A lot of people are disappointed in "The Rules of the Game" the first time they see it. It's burdened with being called "the greatest film ever made."
Newcomers watch it with huge expectations, thinking ok, this is the film that's supposed to kick over every other film I've ever seen in life. In that regard, it always fails. Even when people like it, they often call it overrated.
Obviously, there are many, many reasons why people call it great -- deep focus, long takes, etc. -- and that's all true, but my own answer is this: watch it again.
That is where you really see the greatness, because it's one of those very rare films that not only doesn't diminish on a second viewing, but expands. I think that's why critics and film enthusiasts in general love it so much, because when you look at it again, it doesn't age. The intricacy, the design, the rich characterization only get sharper with every viewing.
It has an absolutely direct deftness, from start to finish: from the perfectly apt poem from "Marriage of Figaro" to the devastating final line. In between, every shot, every line (the script is brilliant on its own) advances the story, and there's nothing wasted in it at all.
Like all great works of art, it is incandescent.
This is the greatest film ever made. I know it often ties with Citizen Kane, but as much as I love Orson Welles and admire his masterpiece, when it comes to depth The Rules of the Game is unparalleled. When people ask me about my favorite films, I always say, "Everything by Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey at the top of the list," but overtopping those heights is Jean Renoir's magnum opus.
I watched The Rules of the Game last night and was not impressed. I felt that I did not get to know those characters. They appeared and disappeared quickly without developing into human beings. It is like Renoir threw them onto the screen, gave them a few lines, and then told them to go home. Character development is the most important thing in a film, and it is nowhere to be found. I just did not care about the characters, their story, and what was happening to them on screen. How am I supposed to care about the shooting if I do not know the character being shot or the one who shoots him?
I felt the film was therefore shallow and superficial. Perhaps Renoir was intentionally making it superficial to make the point that the wealthy class live shallow lives, and that many wealthy persons are evil individuals. This is OBVIOUSLY true about many wealthy people in all cultures, countries, and time periods. It is a shallow message and an idea we have all thought about at some points in our lives. I just don't want to be told something that we either already know, or that we can safely assume is true about people and their times.
Ebert: Wait awhile and see it again. Look for the camera movement. See him making points visually.
Speaking of the film's place on the ubiquitous "best of lists," has anyone seen Paul Schrader's excellent list, on which Renoir's film places very highly indeed?
http://www.cinematical.com/2006/11/14/paul-schraders-film-canon/
One wishes Schrader had actually written the book, proposed as a kind of cinematic version of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, which prompted the list's creation. Schrader is not only among our most eminent screenwriters (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ, Bringing Out the Dead &c.,); he is also a talented and little-appreciated director and a brilliant film critic. In Transcendental Style in Film, Schrader has written the rare book that seems simultaneously authoritative (quite the feat when one considers that his subject is nothing less than the careers of Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer) and fearlessly personal. Perhaps C.S. Lewis represents something like his literary counterpart: while we remember him today mostly as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and as the preeminent Christian apologist of the century, he was also a great and talented literary critic. Indeed, The Allegory of Love is another of those rare idiosyncratic works of criticism that succeeds both as a magisterial survey of a series of authors (much as Schrader's features a triad of directors) and an explication of an original idea (for Lewis, courtly love seems as essential to the work of the authors of the Romance of the Rose, Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, &c.,, as the "transcendental style" is to the films of the directors explored by Schrader).
I was blown away by this film when I saw it as an undergrad in a film course -- it's such a wonderful mix of satire and sadness, and our film instructor did a good job of preparing us to look at elements such as mise en scene and depth of field in order to better inform and enrich our viewing experience.
I'm haunted more by Grand Illusion (and am pretty sure Tarantino was quoting that great film's last scene, to good effect, in the opening minutes of Inglorious Basterds), but Rules of the Game also resonates. That's partially because, as part of that long-ago film course, it's one of the first movies I was asked to approach with some sort of critical rigor and structure. Who says higher education isn't good for something?
I think that this is a great movie, but I have a problem with the hunting scene. I think that it is unethical to kill animals in order to make a movie. I understand that the director wants to criticize the behavior of certain people, but can you do that by duplicating the same behavior by actually gathering and shooting defenseless animals? OK, this was 1939, but still...
I'm one of those folks who have regularly (and sometimes giddily) described this as "the greatest film ever made." I suppose that "the greatest" anything is too heavy a hyperbolic burden for...well...anything (even the astounding M. Ali).
Anyway, I saw this film sometime back in the Miocene Era (that is, the early 970's) when I was in film school. I'd just been editing super-8 film for like12 hours straight and I was all "et" ep w/the outre, the avant-garde, Surrealists, Dadaists, and German Expressionists. Then I attended a campus presentation (16 mm print--probably from Janus Films) in a not-quite dim enough auditorium-functioning-as-theater in the afternoon with a bored projectionist who missed a reel change (probably doing his Biology homework) and had to go back and rethread.
It didn't make any difference.
I still remember how I was transported. The shadows in the film became real shadows that melted into the edges of the walls of the room. Octave walked out, cigarette so Frenchily dripping from his bulbous lip, and spoke to ME, to the WORLD. I was consciously trying to take notes during the showing (it was light enough in the room that I could do that), but I was so consistently and inexorably drawn into the celluloid chiaroscurro world that I had to figuratively pinch myself and remember to write down the occasional note of, oh, something like "I can't believe how perfectly he frames every shot" or "the lighting and camera movement is so perfect, so effortless, it's almost impossible to even notice it--or at least to CONTINUE noticint it."
And that IS what I carry away from the film, more than any of the types of (excellently noodled-out) sociological/anthropological/psychological insights that the Omar Moore expresses in this marvelous critique, the VISUAL impact of the film--the precision, the confidence, the...well, it's not a word that has much meaning anymore in this post-everything world, but I'll use it anyway--the PERFECTION of all these visual elements. I ALWAYS felt that I was EXACTLY where I wanted to be (as the viewer, as the perceiver--as the cinematic "little God") in EVERY scene, at EVERY moment.
Powerful and innovative as, say, Kane is, it's the towering lumbering effort of a monstrously gifted adolescent compared to "Rules."
I suppose a reasonable argument could be made that the film is not robust enough, not--as it were--"manly" enough, that it's sort of a Faberge egg of film. I can see that--particularly for those who know little or nothing of history or love or people or life or film or...and I would echo the recommendation of several of the folk who've already written here--see it again.
Ebert: And I'll echo and echo. When I went through it a shot at a time with a film group, we were all amazed by its depth and visual virtuosity.
Not only The Rules Of The Game is a masterpiece, it has also passed through 70 years without losing an ounce of its wit and satire. It's impressive to notice the difference between Renoir's clear yet elegantly subtle treatment of bourgeoisie and some present movies that pretend to be scandalous and end up being blatantly shallow.
The scene that caught me most was the danse macabre during the party, a dark omen of what Europe (and then the whole world) was going to witness. I especially enjoyed how the guests were disturbed by the skeletons. It was a perfect summa of the hypocritical world on the edge of WW2, and I don't think it could be made today with the same strength. Perhaps the present movies are losing in terms of universality. We've become more able to focus on the particular (and making many masterpieces about it), but it's more difficult to make a movie that reflects human condition like The Rules has done and still does.
Your review does the movie justice, clearly explaining why this movie deserves to be watched more than one time. I would add that if somebody states to have enough after the first vision, that person hasn't understood the Rules (of the Game, but also of the movies) at all.
This movie catches a particular section of French society exactly as Renoir found it when he made it. Ominous clouds have already gathered but these people can't get out of their tomfooleries. Most of us continue in our smug existence, oblivious of the gravity of life.
You're absolutely right Sir; their is no question about it.
Actually "The Rules of the Game" and "The Diary of a Chambermaid" were
made decades before Mr. Bunuel could conceive a retelling of the same source.
The difference is in the art not the execution, both filmmakers come from an
"artistic" background; before they turned to film, there is no "which is bitter",
there is only fingerprints on their films; it's not a remake but more of a retread.
In the circle of artists; we consider them immortals (if not gods to others),
to create something out of thin air and give it principles, boundaries and or ethics
in which the creator themselves have to face and challenge; is nothing but the work
of gods, that's where Mr. Bunuel stands out from his predecessor; he elevates the
material not just transcends it; and makes it his own, you can apply you philosophy
to Mr. Altman; in contrast; but not to Mr. Bunuel.
Their have been a handful of great "remakes" over the decades not "retread" that
where looked down on or frowned upon and some where excellent; but few, like:
Le salaire de la peur aka. The Wages of Fear into (the ridiculously "studio titled")
The Sorcerer, Insomnia and Bad Lieutenant, those where remakes.
As an artist; I would go with Luis Bunuel, but as a film student "The Rules of the Game"
is the deal.