The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Comedy of manners

DIRECTOR

Jean Renoir

WRITERS

Jean Renoir, Carl Koch

STARS

Nora Gregor, Marcel Dalio, Paulette Dubost, Roland Toutain, Jean Renoir

BEFORE

1937 Renoir’s movie about prisoners of war in World War I, Grand Illusion is the first foreign-language movie to receive a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars.

1938 Renoir’s adaptation of Émile Zola’s novel The Human Beast is a huge success.

AFTER

1941 After the critical and box-office failure of The Rules of the Game, Renoir makes his way to Hollywood. His first US movie is Swamp Water.

The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) is a biting satire about the French upper classes on the brink of World War II, who are endlessly frivolous despite, or perhaps because of, the impending conflict.

At the time of its release in 1939, The Rules of the Game was an expensive flop, shunned by the public and critics alike—in part because of its contrast to director Jean Renoir’s previous movie, Grand Illusion (1937), a reflection on humanity’s triumph over class. At its premiere on July 7, 1939, the audience booed. In October that year, the authorities banned the movie, as “depressing, morbid, immoral… an undesirable influence over the young.”

Rediscovering the movie

During the war, the original negatives of the movie were thought to have been destroyed in a bombing raid. In the late 1950s, two movie enthusiasts found them in boxes at the bombed-out film lab. With Renoir’s help, they painstakingly pieced the negatives together. The restored version was premiered at the 1959 Venice Film Festival to acclaim.

The poacher Marceau (Julien Carette, left) is offered a job by Robert (Marcel Dalio) to help him catch rabbits.

Country retreat

Renoir’s movie focuses on a weekend at the country estate of society lady Christine (Nora Gregor) and her husband Robert (Marcel Dalio). Relationships gradually unravel, and the weekend will end in a tragedy. André (Roland Toutain), a last-minute invitee, has just flown solo across the Atlantic to impress Christine. When she fails to turn up to greet him, André refuses to play by the rules and act the hero in interviews, something for which he will be made to pay. His friend Octave (played by Renoir) obtained the invitation for André, but he too has ulterior motives. Octave hopes to set André up with Robert’s erstwhile mistress Geneviève, distracting André from Christine and Geneviève from Robert.

There is intrigue both upstairs and down. Later, a gun will be fired and tragedy will strike after a bloody case of mistaken identity. But Renoir makes sure to let viewers know that even this changes nothing in the cloistered lives of his characters. They just keep playing on as before.

The movie depicts the callousness of the ruling class—no more tellingly than during a rabbit hunt, in which the men blast away at any animal that passes in front of their guns. However, it was not Renoir’s purpose in this movie to demonize the upper classes. He presents them as children, trapped in a game they feel compelled to play. “The awful thing about life is this:” says Octave, “Everybody has their reasons.”

In order to heighten the sense of being trapped—within the country house and in the claustrophobic social games of the upper class—Renoir developed a new way of filming with superfast lenses to allow extreme depth of field. This novel “deep-field” technique meant that he could keep the foreground action in focus while people were seen flitting to and fro in the background, carrying on with their own personal stories.

“That’s also part of the times—today everyone lies.”

André / The Rules of the Game

Love is a game that is played according to complex, dangerous rules in the enclosed, upper-class world of the movie.

The son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was born in 1894 in Montmartre, Paris, and grew up among artists. He started out as a ceramicist, then tried his hand at screenwriting in the 1920s. His early movies were flops, but he scored major successes in the late 1930s. After the poor reception of The Rules of the Game, Renoir moved to the US, where he enjoyed only limited success for movies such as Swamp Water (1941). He died in Beverly Hills, California, in 1979.

1931 La Chienne

1937 Grand Illusion

1938 The Human Beast

1939 The Rules of the Game

What else to watch: Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) ✵ Grand Illusion (1937) ✵ Citizen Kane (1941) ✵ French Cancan (1954) ✵ Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) ✵ Gosford Park (2001)