‘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!