The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu)
Comedy of Manners | 110 Minutes | 1939 | France
(4/4)
Director: Jean Renoir | Producers: Claude Renoir, Jean Ray | Writers: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch | Starring: Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Marcel Dalio, Roland Toutain, Jean Renoir, Mila Parély, Julien Carette, Gaston Modot | Music: Joseph Kosma, Roger Désormière | Cinematographer: Jean Bachelet | Editors: Marthe Huguet, Marguerite Renoir
The Rules of the Game, now regarded among the greatest films in all of cinema, was a flop among Parisian audiences when it was first released. Jean Renoir had satirised contemporary social mores in the story of a rowdy vagrant, Boudu Saved from Drowning, in one of his early sound pictures, but by the end of the thirties his class consciousness had taken a more political bent and he had been embraced by the left wing.
The Rules of the Game therefore served up something of a surprise when it appeared in the summer of 1939, on the heels of La Grande Illusion and Le Bête Humaine. Fascism was sweeping across Europe, and after taking the fight to the ideology in some of his earlier works, now Renoir briefly turned it to his advantage by casting Nora Gregor in one of his lead roles. Gregor and her husband, an Austrian prince and prominent nationalist politician, had fled the Nazis to arrive in France.
Instead Renoir produced a bawdy comedy with French airs and graces, which seems to share much in common with so many American films of the late thirties with their loose morals, gender distortions, and hedonistic flushes of romance. The inspirations may have been Marivaux and Beaumarchais, but in style and temperament The Rules of the Game rubs up equally alongside The Philadelphia Story and the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks.
Through the passage of time The Rules of the Game emerged as the comedy of manners par excellence and the defining treatment of upstairs-downstairs drama on film. Just as frantic as anything that was happening across the Atlantic, the picture is even more liberating from the perspective of its overlapping romances and ensemble cast.
The celebrated aviator André Jurieux (Roland Toutain) sweeps in off an Atlantic current. He has crossed the ocean in record time, only to be left hanging by the woman he loves. He expresses his sorrow to a waiting reporter, who excuses his tiredness as an engineer instead begins reeling off aeroplane facts. André is maudlin and accuses Christine (Nora Gregor) of betrayal, knowing all too well that Christine has been married to another man, Robert (Marcel Dalio), for several years.
Christine is an Austrian émigré whose father was a famous conductor, while Robert is Marquis de la Chesnaye, a French-Jewish aristocrat. The upper classes in The Rules of the Game maintain at least the pretence of genteel knowing. To Christine’s relief, Robert is aware of her dalliance with André, while she shares in the common knowledge that Robert keeps a mistress, Geneviève de Marras (Mila Parély). With renewed understanding, Robert and Christine declare their devotion to one another.
Robert meets Geneviève the following morning to explain his predicament, but in the meantime he invites her to his estate at La Colinière for a week-long retreat. The amiable Octave (Jean Renoir), a friend of Christine’s since childhood and André’s closest confidante, encourages Robert and Christine to also invite André along on the trip. Perhaps, Octave jokes with Robert, André and Geneviève will prove a suitable match.
La Colinière offers a carefully orchestrated sequence of revolving doors and rabbit hunts. Most of the players at La Colinière are keenly aware of their roles, until the shifting shapes and flickering lights of a pantomime cause their tent to collapse.
The conventional love triangle gathers sides and rounds corners as an affair which variously involves Christine, Robert, André, Octave, Geneviève, and Christine’s niece is matched in the servants’ quarters in the cat-and-mouse between Schumacher (Gaston Modot), the gamekeeper of La Colinière, his reluctant wife and Christine’s maid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), and the roguish poacher Marceau (Julien Carette). Schumacher the brusque Alsatian proves too crude for his surrounds, while Marceau lingers too long under the nose for all of his puckishness.
André understands the rules but remains hopelessly earnest. Robert is a charming dilettante, who tinkers absently with his music boxes. Like Schumacher, Christine is palpably out of place, at once the collective object of desire and at impervious remove from the action.
Octave seems in some way to serve as the moral centre of the group, but maybe it’s just his girth. He is an oversized Pierrot, whose surface geniality and handsiness with Lisette masks riptides of disappointment and alcoholism. The role is played with real warmth by Renoir, a more garrulous and jowly substitute for his brother Pierre. In The Rules of the Game poor Octave is destined to serve somewhere between ringmaster and coat check.
Whether eyeing his characters from afar, sometimes from a low angle to give the impression of voyeurism, or chasing them through doorways and round corners, Renoir imbues his scenes with a skittish momentum. The gestures are easy and refined but the movement is restless.
Renoir and his cinematographer Jean Bachelet used special lenses to achieve a depth of field which captures the room-hopping upstairs and all of the commotion downstairs in the kitchen. Characters flit between rooms and up and down corridors or roam the shadows, keeping their distance. Foreground becomes background and vice versa, for instance when Octave, struggling to get out of his bear suit, repeatedly crosses paths with Schumacher and Lisette, whose search for Marceau merges with the search for Christine, idly flirting with yet another suitor.
Long takes and lingering moods provide space for the lulls and hesitations as well as the niceties of conversation, much of which was improvised on set. The gilded house and its mechanisms offer a stultifying contrast to the roving inhabitants, its panes of glass and chandeliers fleetingly catching the eye like a hall of mirrors.
The Rules of the Game surveys the sort of upper class society which seems always in the throes of decay, surfeited by its charms and rapt by a sense of yearning. Perhaps those gathered at La Colinière are dimly aware of the world on a precipice, but they are used to finding means of escape, and the portrayal is fond rather than damning. The Rules of the Game fizzes with wit and carries the splendours of farce, rising above the suspended mournfulness.
If Octave provides the undertow, Robert maintains a sparkling visage, played with impeccable grace and watery eyes by Dalio. When The Rules of the Game flopped in France, Octave was deemed the culprit. Renoir was urged to cut many of his own scenes, resulting in a drastically reduced runtime: as Octave advises Robert, the awful thing about life is that everyone has their reasons. Reconstructed by 1959, The Rules of the Game shows that human foibles are timeless.
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