Reviews of The Rules of the Game
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WhatsUpWill
11Mar12
You know that feeling you get when you watch a film and you feel like at least a dozen things aesthetically and thematically went over your head? Yeah, I got that feeling constantly while watching this film. The Rules of the Game elicits the same kind of feeling for me as I got for 8 1/2, the first film I reviewed for List of Shame almost a year ago. Pinning down the film as to why it’s so important is somewhat difficult, but let me try. 1. It’s a comedy of the bourgeoisie. It makes me laugh like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and it disgusts me just as much as Eyes Wide Shut. The characters have little moral compass. All of them engage in marital affairs and rarely does one even bat an eyelash at their (or each others’) behavior. The men are conquerors, the women are damsels in distress. But the conquerors continue to desire to conquer and the damsels continue to desire to be saved and conquered. The film bubbles into insanity in the second and third acts that results in the audience to ask the question why their marriages even matter. This question doesn’t cross the character’s minds because their marriages don’t matter (the only character to care, seemingly, is Schumacher, but he’s never shown to really love his wife, only to keep her) because marriage was only a means for themselves to keep or gain their status quo. Whereas Madame De… shows the result of what happens when someone pursues true love within the system, The Rules of the Game shows just that: the system that the rich has created for themselves to give themselves some entertainment in their boring lives. Life’s a stage, might as well act out your roles, and if you can’t, make up roles and motivations for yourself to create a more interesting narrative for your life. What’s frightening about the film is how this system is seemingly idealized by the help aka the middle/lower (?) class. It feels as though Renoir is making a prediction when the character at the end tells the other that Robert is classy for referring to the murder as an accident. The film was banned upon released. I could only imagine the reason being that the film attacks the people who produced it – I wouldn’t be surprised if all of the characters that took part in The Coliniere are themselves art patrons.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
Musycks
16Dec08
‘Rules Of The Game’ was the French film that for me unlocked the door to the philosophical way the French see things. After being force fed the artificiality of Carne’s ‘Les Enfants Du Paradis’, and being underwhelmed with ‘Breathless’, both of which I was too young to appreciate (but eventually did), it was easy to succumb to the humanist charm of a Renoir fable. The fatalistic element of pre-war French cinema which came to be the dominant tone of ‘Poetic Realism’ reaches it’s apogee in this film, where the characters act out a seemingly pre-determined path, accepting the twists with a metaphorical Gallic shrug. The existentialism of Satre and Camus is also part of the fabric of philosophical depth here, the characters needing to find meaning in a complex and bewildering world where ‘everyone has their reasons’. Men and women struggle for a level of self-awareness that will elevate their actions, aware that love yearned for is always superior to love experienced.
A beautiful pre-World War One song called ‘Let The Great Big World Keep Turning’ has the exquisite line ‘Love they say must come to one and all, of high and low degree’, this could have been Renoirs jumping off point for ‘Rules Of The Game’. The story unfolds as a series of inter-related affairs impact on the weekend activities of the upper class at play. Renoir seems to be saying this is what all humans do, but pretend not to, so are we not all hypocrites? Indeed it scandalised the French, the mirror held up to them was a little too revealing perhaps and Jean was virtually persona non grata overnight. He was bemused by the reaction as he himself said, he’d grown up amongst artists and bohemians and had always been taught to see the world as ‘one big knocking shop’! It seemed Renoir bumped up against the limit of French tolerance in 1939. Of course they had other things on their minds.
It is the quintessential ensemble piece, no one player dominating, but a couple of notable scene stealing turns from Julien Carette (a Renoir favourite in his 4th appearance in a row for Jean) and Paulette Dubost as a flirtatious servant and a quiet aristocratic centre from Marcel Dalio are standouts. The filming of the hunt is brutal by modern standards, and it’s odd after years of viewing post Rambo Hollywood violence-porn that seeing some rabbits actually get shot could be so confronting, but as with the dialogue we are not spared the harsh realities that convention would have had Renoir water down.
In the Renoir canon, this surely belongs in his top 2 or 3. It would be hard to imagine a more insightful, heartfelt film. Renoir might have been saying everyone has their reasons, but he was not judging, he was not putting himself outside all of us, merely pointing out that human longings are a common thread that can easily lead to trancendance or tragedy, and that the dividing line can be a very slender one.
‘Rules of the Game’ is part farce, part drama, part romantic triangle, but all the parts are working sympathetically to create a masterful, coherant whole. Renoir is saying that the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us. It’s for the politicians to appeal to our base prejudices, to exploit our insecurities, here the artist lays them out for us to view and consider during an era where politicians would march the whole world into conflict once more.
Both John Ford and Francios Truffaut called him the greatest director. He is not only a great starting point for understanding French cinema, he’s the point you’ll probably arrive back at after you’ve unravelled the mysteries of Godard, Bresson, Melville, et al. If Carne and Duvivier came to be restricted by being solely thought of as ‘Poetic Realists’ Renoir’s legacy trancends any such summation, even if he provided some of the genre’s most enduring masterpieces in La Bete Humaine and The Lower Depths. Renoirs deep humanity illuminates all his work, so if this is his greatest film, it will stand as long as we behave like humans, with all our follies, foibles and affairs of the heart. C’est magnifique!