Beyond the Multiplex

A restored version of one of the best movies ever made, "Rules of the Game." Plus: A transsexual romance and a "Memento" rip-off.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

"Rules of the Game"

Nov. 2, 2006 | A lot has been written about Jean Renoir's 1939 film "Rules of the Game." Too much, maybe. For many years it has ranked near the top in critics' lists of the best films ever. In Sight & Sound magazine's most recent critics' poll, it's at No. 3, behind only "Citizen Kane" and "Vertigo." Yet "Rules of the Game" doesn't have much of a popular constituency and never did; it was a horrendous bomb when it opened in Paris in the summer before the Nazi invasion of France, and it doesn't make the top 250 films ranked by IMDb users.

Many digressive topics beckon here, but I'm going to try to resist them: the strange human compulsion to make lists and compare things that, philosophically, ought to be incomparable; the gulf between critical and popular tastes (you're sick of that one, if you've ever read this column before); the fact that contemporary audiences literally have difficulty understanding most films made before the '60s; my own sense of confusion and betrayal every time I see "Vertigo." Those topics are all alluring, but they're liable to make me angry and distracted. The subject of the day is "Rules of the Game," now available in a digitally restored print of amazing clarity that comes as close to Renoir's lost 1939 original as we're ever going to get. You should see it.

Mind you, "Rules of the Game" can make you angry and distracted too. Like most critics, I fling around words like "masterpiece" and "genius" and "brilliance" too much. They become cheapened, but, more than that, they confer a dusty schoolroom haze on works meant, more often than not, to shock or alarm us, make us laugh or scream, thrill us with the fear of death and awaken us to the cruelty and suffering of our fellow beings. God knows we don't always want that, but if you'll forgive the pompous sentiment, that sort of thing is the Mission of Art.

Renoir's own perspective on the failure of "Rules of the Game" was that he had succeeded in his artistic mission a little too well. In the summer of 1939, Czechoslovakia had already been surrendered to Hitler, who would invade Poland at the end of the summer (and France the following spring). "Rules of the Game" never mentions these events directly. In the film a group of aristocrats and their servants converge on a rural estate to hunt pheasants and rabbits, have a big costume ball, and engage in romantic intrigue. The plot is largely borrowed from Alfred de Musset's 19th century play "Les Caprices de Marianne," a classic French tragicomedy of marital faithlessness and its consequences. Sounds like fun, right?

Well, it is and it isn't. There's a certain amount of wife-swapping, ass-slapping, cuckold-chasing slapstick in "Rules of the Game," but even that is always on the verge of descending into violent chaos. There's a large cast of lovely ladies and chivalrous gentlemen. They make entertaining company, most of the time. They want to make love and have fun, like the rest of us. But they're also a little bored, uncertain about what to do next, not always likable. There's a shocking sequence, only a few minutes long but unforgettable, when the shooting party massacres the rabbits driven out of the woods by "beaters." (It's unmistakably real: The death toll is 12 bunnies, although it feels like 100, and the sequence of shots took two months to complete.)

"Rules of the Game" has no clear central character. Octave, the genial, overweight aristocrat so memorably played by Renoir himself, may come the closest, but he's a self-loathing buffoon unable to seize his own chance at happiness, whose actions are an unstable mixture of nobility and cowardice. There isn't exactly a central event, either; the one that would provide the climax to almost any other treatment of this material -- a man is shot and killed -- is tossed off and hastily covered up, as if it were an irrelevant footnote.

Amid the tense international situation of 1939, you'd think a movie about the adventures of the idle rich and their earthier servants would be just the ticket. But not these idle rich people, or their adventures. "People go to the cinema in the hope of forgetting their everyday problems," Renoir writes in his 1974 autobiography, "and it was precisely their own worries that I plunged them into ... I depicted pleasant, sympathetic characters, but showed them in a society in process of disintegration, so that they were defeated at the outset ... The audience recognized this. The truth is that they recognized themselves."

Even this is perhaps too much interpretation, too much history. But it may be easier to appreciate "Rules of the Game" if you grasp something of its context, and if you understand that the film's tonal confusion, like its refusal to divide its large cast into heroes and villains, cheaters and victims, is deliberate. A certain fanciful subtraction may also be helpful: If you imagine a world where the films of Bergman, Truffaut, Altman, Mike Leigh and Woody Allen (among others) don't yet exist, you can begin to understand the prodigious influence of this movie. (Renoir himself would make many later films, in American exile and then back in France, including some good ones, but never got close to this level again.)

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