Mar. 20, 2007 - Issue #596: Monkey Warfare

Times may change, but The Rules of the Game don’t

There are many class-conscious reasons to see Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), from the high-art and high-minded—one of cinema’s masterworks, it’s also a favourite of Altman and Bertolucci—to the lowly and sympathetic: the film was so pilloried that someone tried to burn a theatre it was playing in, the French government banned it for a month, then Nazi occupiers destroyed many of the prints.

More cineastes would put the film in their top 10 if they weren’t exalting another Renoir offering (The Grand Illusion), but the nerve that The Rules of the Game so sharply touched still crackles on screen, along with the dialogue, dry and tart as champagne, and the elegant camerawork, revealing so much ado about nothing.

Perhaps the best reason to watch is to watch again—from De Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), the cavalier hypocrite-king of the master-class, to Christine (Nora Gregor), that apple-eating temptress whom courtiers blame even as they pursue, there’s too much to take in at one sitting with this satirical feast. Caustic social criticism jumps into bed with Wildean social comedy—Renoir’s film isn’t, as an opening intertitle notes, merely “a study of manners” but a scathing attack on the show of feeling by a murderously superficial elite (gathered at a country-house party for the weekend).

Dark presentiments of holocaust, warfare and French collusion swirl, from the ghoulish dancing of skeletons during a skit by the guests at De Chesnaye’s estate to the sudden outbursts of violence during the night’s party, and then the horrifyingly casual cover-up, which only proves to one guest, a military man, that “This De Chesnaye has class. And that’s rare.”

Only André Jurieu (Roland Toutain), the famous pilot who’s fallen hard for De Chesnaye’s wife Christine, nobly upholds a code of honour. Such ethics are pathetically amiss in a world where De Chesnaye’s music boxes, mechanical warblers and stuffed animals have more of a throbbing core than the people swirling and gliding through the seemingly open, palatial rooms, in pursuit of a love that’s really a curiosity or even a curio, just a “small token of affection.” The lower orders imitate, both more buffoonishly and more ardently, the careless passions of those upstairs. Renoir doesn’t spare himself—he plays the bumbling uncle-ish figure of Octave, who acts paternally protective of Christine. This big, gruff but affable man dons a bear costume for one skit. It’s a strangely beautiful merger of predator and prey, the artifice of culture masking stark nature in a film where the spiffy, dapper guests stand behind propped-up wood blinds among bare trees and a scrub landscape as they pick off rabbits and birds scattered by the hired help. One shot rabbit twitchingly reminds us of the death and violence on which this classy world thrives.

Affairs and heartbreaks are poses and rituals that circle listlessly around something meaningful, something beyond riches (“You can fight hatred, but not boredom”) in a world based on casual slaughter (“only 60 pheasant the first day”) and heartless play. The camera cunningly tracks the game-players, pulling back to reveal more of the chase, framing shots with mirror reflections, scrolled banisters, curved staircases and other markers of self-deluding, dizzying, soaring wealth.

From flippant racism to detached flirtations, the masquerade goes on—“The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons” for self-deception, playing their parts in this vital Grand Illusion. As Octave/Renoir says, “Today everyone lies,” but to themselves most of all. Like any great classic, the more you watch it, the more Renoir’s masterwork seems to reflect the cold, hard truth—The Rules of the Game still apply. V

?Sat, Mar 24 & Mon, Mar 26 (7 pm);
Sun, Mar 25 (9 pm)
THE RULES OF THE GAME
Directed by jean renoir
Written by renoir & carl koch
Starring Nora Gregor, Roland Toutain, Marcel Dalio
Metro Cinema, $10

New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.