The Rules of the Game
France, 1939, 113 min (reduced to 85 min, then reconstructed in 1965 to current length of 105 min), b&w
Dir Jean Renoir; Asst dir André Zwobada and Henri Cartier-Bresson; Scr Renoir with Carl Koch; Prod NEF; Cinematog Jean Bachelet; Music Roger Desormières and Joseph Kosma; Art dir Eugène Lourié and Max Douy; Sound Joseph de Bretagne; Edit Marguerite Houllé-Renoir and Marthe Huguet; Act Nora Gregor (Christine, Marquise de la Chesnay), Marcel Dalio (Marquis de la Chesnay), Roland Toutain (Jurieu), Jean Renoir (Octave), Gaston Modot (Schumacher), Julien Carette (Marceau), Mila Parély (Geneviève de Marrast), Odette Talazac (Charlotte), Paulette Dubost (Lisette), Pierre Magnier, Pierre Nay, Richard Francœur, André Zwobada, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
This is one of the most nearly perfect films ever made. It is impossible to do justice to it in the available space. Unlike most of Jean Renoir’s films, it was largely his own conception (and incidentally production), though he acknowledges being inspired by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century satirists such as Beaumarchais, Marivaux, and de Musset—especially the last’s Les Caprices de Marianne, which provided the basic situation of a woman hesitating between several men, to the exclusion of the one man who really loves her and who dies when mistaken for one of the other suitors. It is also notably close to Yves Mirande’s boulevard comedy Sept hommes . . . une femme (1936), which situates its action in a chateau owned by a widowed countess who tests the suitability of seven suitors representing different social and moral positions. A crucial montage hunting scene in that film leads to the widow being discovered in a half-embrace with one of her suitors, and ends with a round of boisterous bedtime rituals in a tiled corridor of the chateau. Both that film and Sacha Guitry’s Désiré (1937, #68) establish a systematic pattern of parallel conversations and situations upstairs and downstairs, recognizably similar to this, while in Désiré, the cook’s husband is a policeman who plays a role analogous to that here of Schumacher the gamekeeper.
Renoir’s great achievement is to weld together this disparate material and to modulate from the original comedy of manners through the cold brutality of the hunt scene and the riotous farce of the consequent hunt inside the chateau to the tragedy of its “accidental” conclusion. It seems clear from contemporary reviews that it was at least partly this disjunction of tone and mood that disconcerted opening night audiences. Georges Sadoul and others reported whistles, boos, outbursts of rage, seats destroyed, and newspapers being set alight in the aisles. Probably emanating from a right-wing cabal, these disruptions resulted in multiple cuts to the film.175 Renoir himself attributed the reaction to an audience accustomed to romantic narratives being confronted with a classical, distanced style. All commentators exaggerate the extent of the film’s failure, however, in the interests of artistic myth-making. The film had, after all, just completed a moderately successful first-release run when the declaration of war cut short that exclusive release. It was bidding fair to exceed the annual average box-office return, and was due to be screened in the Rex, the Gaumont Palace, 157 suburban cinemas, and 52 provincial towns. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that it would have fallen far short of the phenomenal success of his two recent triumphs, La Grande Illusion (#60) and La Bête humaine (#91).
Another possible source of initial disaffection is the lack of any name actor in the cast—no Jean Gabin, but Marcel Dalio, Roland Toutain, Julien Carette, Gaston Modot, and Paulette Dubost, who were accustomed to playing secondary roles, and Nora Gregor, an unknown in France, having appeared only in German-language films. Exacerbating this lack of focus is the lack of a central character with whom the spectator could identify. This absence was, however, probably deliberate, since Renoir’s aim was the analysis of a group, a class, a whole society, rather than a personalized “adventure.” As he often repeated, the failure of the Popular Front and the imminent war were sufficiently unsettling to inspire him to target the national and international bourgeoisie whom he considered responsible. Sadoul, speaking as always as a communist, saw La Règle du jeu as a continuation of Renoir’s socialist class analysis, doing for the approaching war what Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro had done for the French Revolution— namely portray a refined civilization blindly unaware of its decadence, a civilization that, as de Boïeldieu and von Rauffenstein had already foreshadowed, was doomed to extinction.
Much of the delight in viewing and reviewing the film is in coming to appreciate the way a relatively small number of simple metaphors are mobilized to construct a complex satire of that society. The rules of the social game are maintained by “gamekeepers” such as Schumacher, whose job is to keep animality in check. Poachers are outsiders who do not know or who refuse to recognize these rules. The tragedy of the film is generated by an ill-advised intrusion by poachers above and below stairs (Jurieu and Marceau) into a society of which they ignore the conventions and traditions. The gamekeepers (the marquis and Schumacher) are likened in the extreme to “machine men” who regulate the routine functioning of society, by force if necessary. The marquis’s delight in his collection of mechanical people is as appropriate as his confused pride and self-consciousness at his latest acquisition, a mechanical organ. That the consequent hunting(s) of the poachers/animals by the gamekeepers/mechanical men leads to the killing of Jurieu rather than Marceau is only superficially therefore an accident.
Yet this already powerful system of metaphors becomes more complex even as it is being elaborated. If the two poachers are not averse to a little animality, neither is the marquis, who is conducting an affair with Geneviève. If the same two poachers are prime examples of outsiders, their “not belonging” is shared to some extent by everyone in the cast: Christine herself is an Austrian, as is Schumacher, out of place in French society; and Christine’s dalliance with Saint-Aubin, Jurieu, and Octave links her with the poachers. The casting of Dalio, a Jew, more normally allotted the role of sleazy half-cast, as the Marquis de la Chesnaye, arbiter of French traditions, was a masterstroke. Defended by his cook as the representative of authentic taste, he needs to be defended precisely because of the cultural baggage of outsiderness that he brings with him, and of which others are not slow to remind us. Hence his recognition of what might seem an improbable compatibility between the marquis and Marceau the poacher. When Christine looks through field glasses to see a squirrel, she sees instead her husband.
Renoir updates and personalizes all this material by having the intruder be an aviator, just as he himself had been in World War I, when as a nonaristocrat he joined the aristocratic cavalry. He further personalizes it, of course, by casting himself as Octave, point of contact between outsiders and insiders, upstairs and down, prey to all the divisions embodied in these metaphors: an artist and dreamer who struggles to divest himself of his animal-skin, and who emerges onto the balcony at the height of the chaotic festivities to conduct an imaginary orchestra—this film—only to let his hands drop in despair. Friend, confidant, and finally suitor to Christine, he also dallies with Lisette—an Eve, crunching her innumerable apples. Renoir/Octave is a sensualist (like his father), and this film can be seen as a transitional film between the class-obsessed films he had been making for the last five years and the pantheistic, woman-obsessed films he was to make after the war.
As well as being the most formally exquisite film he ever made, La Règle du jeu is technically impressive: the montage hunt has always been widely admired, but despite that flurry of brief shots, the film’s average shot length is a slow 18.4 seconds because of the numerous long takes elsewhere. Making the case for a metaphysical realism, André Bazin singled out this film in particular for the way in which extreme depth of field allows Renoir to film a number of different nodes of action at varying distances from the camera, all in focus. Renoir himself notes the delight that he and Dalio took in one such scene, where their antics behind the foreground action totally undercut the difficult explanations that Christine is trying to give of her relationship with Jurieu. He and Jean Bachelet, the director of photography, had ordered special fast lenses which still allowed great depth of field so that they could keep their backgrounds in focus all the time. It is for feats such as this that Bazin singled Renoir out as the great realist filmmaker of the prewar period, predecessor of Orson Welles and William Wyler through his attempts to capture the intricate ambiguities and complexities of existence, while for this film’s outspoken attack on contemporary social structures, Jacques-Bernard Brunius identified it as the true heir of Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’or.176
175. See, for this and many other reasons, Curchod and Faulkner’s account of the evolution of the text in La Règle du jeu, ed. O. Curchod and C. Faulkner (Paris: Nathan, 1999), esp. 19–20.
176. Brunius, En marge du cinéma français, 176–177.