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MovieMail's Review
Lists of the 10 best films ever made fluctuate with fashion (just like everything else), but you can always be sure that certain titles will be there. Welles' Citizen Kane, Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Renoir's enduring masterpiece. It's amazing to consider now that this humane and intelligent comedy of manners was ignored by the public and damned by the critics in its day (not to mention the further indignity of being re-cut by the distributors). Looked at today, this picture of French society on the eve of the outbreak of World War Two remains as fresh and affecting as ever.
Dismissed by both public and critics on its first release, re-cut by its producers and then banned by the French government as 'demoralising', La Règle du Jeu now has an established place in Top Ten greatest film lists of both critics and directors alike. On the surface a series of triangular dramas taking place over a country house weekend, the film is in fact a study in the corruption and decay of a dying social class - if not a whole society. Its reputation as one of the greatest films ever made is indisputable.
Standing simultaneously at the climax and at the end of French classical realism and epitomising all that Renoir stood for, La Regle du Jeu is much, much more than a c... more >
Standing simultaneously at the climax and at the end of French classical realism and epitomising all that Renoir stood for, La Regle du Jeu is much, much more than a comedy of manners. It is a map of France. < less
This ‘society farce’ is about honour, class and infidelity. Its influences being the Comedie Francais and the classics of Comeille and Racene. An ensemble of players p... more >
This ‘society farce’ is about honour, class and infidelity. Its influences being the Comedie Francais and the classics of Comeille and Racene. An ensemble of players pirouette towards an eventual tragedy. Triangles of indiscretion above and below stairs show that behaviour is only superficially a matter of class. Nobility and servants are confidants in a tradition which represents a closed society. Class conflicts are elsewhere. The film is not so much dissected but embraced by Renoir’s humanism. He also plays a bumbling central character. Most of the characters reflect this warmth despite their amorality. Eros is ever present in Renoir, ever enjoyable, ever destructive. Ironically, the more honourable participants are boorish but we see the passions, the decadence that lies beneath the surface of the discreet charm of the nobility and the upper bourgeoisie. The sweetness of polite sentimentality is exposed. The film depicts an end to an era and presages the coming of the Second World War. Made in 1939, it was banned. Not least because Renoir casts a French Jew and an Austrian as Marquis and Marchioness. The film is a cinematic joy. Characters are interwoven as in a fine tapestry. Conversation and action overlapped as in the composition of a fugue; most evidently in a breathtaking house party scene where pretence and reality becomes hilariously and farcically entangled. The film is composed of some thirty tracking shots, thus allowing the action to flow. This has the effect of making even the small roles as much a part of the whole as the leading players. There are no villains (despite Renoir’s view that his character was ‘the villain’) but it is about decades and hypocrisy and the consequences for those who break the ‘rules of the game’. The dance macabre replaces the jolly entertainment, there is the death; comedy is replaced by tragedy, shadows fall upon the walls and doors close. Classical realism’s ability to encompass moral forces however ironically is now lost in the cinema and in an age of moral ambiguity this film is a reminder to us of universality. < less
