This very verbal French classic had a problem ‘translating’ back in the day, when the subtitles placed on foreign films couldn’t keep up with its fast-paced dialogue. Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is a sophisticated satire that revolves around a madcap week in a country mansion where illicit loves and jealousies play out among the wealthy folk and their servants. It was reportedly a flop upon its release in 1939 but critics and boosters such as Orson Welles later elevated it to the status of one of the best films ever made. This third Criterion edition again makes a foreign classic not only accessible, but understandable.
International tensions don’t seem to bother those in the higher economic reaches of French society. Life is good and the social calendars are full. Robert de la Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio) and his beautiful wife Christine (Nora Grégor) invite a mob of socialites to his country mansion La Colinière for a week of merriment and hunting. Among them are Marcel’s long-time mistress Genviève (Mila Parély), her new amour, famous aviator André Jurieu (Roland Toutain), and friendly hanger-on Octave (Jean Renoir). Meanwhile, Christine’s maid Lisette (Paulette Dubost) is avoiding her husband, gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot), choosing instead to flirt with the scallywag Marceau (Julien Carette), a poacher newly promoted to bootblack. It’s a very public country gathering. The guests try to sort out their private affairs, outdoing one another with their selfish desires and equally self-serving gestures of sophisticated tolerance.
How does one make the right film at the wrong time, commercially speaking? Jean Renoir’s critical satire of French society arrived just when it was least welcome. His characters are rich, vain, and lost in their own sense of romanticism. More to the point, the well-to-do Frenchmen are absorbed by their petty interests, and blind to the forces that are drawing the unprepared country into a new war.
Let the frivility proceed.
Being rich and footloose has its downside. The getaway guests fritter their dignity away on cheap games that only prove the shallowness of their desires. Robert is obsessed with his hobby, mechanical music boxes and a giant musical wagon. These come to represent the order and sanity missing in the pointless charades played during the weekend of hunting. The leading lady wants the world to revolve around her personal romantic trials, yet she assumes that everyone else’s amours are cheap physical betrayals. A celebrity hero is a romantic dunce who thinks absconding with another man’s wife is okay if one observes chivalrous rules of conduct. Robert is willing to prove his love by letting his wife go without a fight, when he could keep her just by letting her know how irreplaceable she is. A slightly oafish fifth-wheel confidante throws himself into a romantic hysteria of his own. It’s circus of hanky-panky both real and imagined. The collected guests coolly observe the show, while congratulating themselves on their ‘sophisticated’ acceptance of it all.
Hidden in this comedy of manners is a thicket of satirical barbs. Renoir’s observances of class friction are double-sided: the servants equal their masters for meanness and intolerance. Some denigrate the landowner with anti-Semitic remarks. The big difference between them and their employers is a lack of bourgeois restraint. Domestic struggles are more direct: when a husband in the servant ranks catches his wife with another man, a fight breaks out.
One woman thinks when Columbus discovered America, ‘he found it inhabited by Negroes.’
Renoir’s satire isn’t about giving people funny names or making them do outrageous things — there’s not a single unlikeable character here. Robert is a sweetheart who wants everyone to be happy. His old flame sincerely believes his marriage is a bust. The aviator is not wicked, he just can’t avoid his obsession with Robert’s wife. The aggressive gamekeeper just wants his wife back. When the rascal poacher Marcel is invited to work in the household, the resulting chaos compares to that in Renoir’s Boudou Saved from Drowning.
Renoir himself plays the ‘fifth wheel’ friend, the one who enjoys everyone’s confidence but innocently betrays them all. He wears a giant bear costume in the masquerade and becomes the story’s clown. The story’s message directly relates the film’s petty events to the country’s general denial of the impending calamity. Renoir’s character is the one to deliver it.
We’re told that Parisian audiences for The Rules of the Game expected reassurance but instead found a sly comedy that pointed an accusing finger. No virtuous main character emerges to set a moral tone. The ignorant attitudes of the rich aren’t softened by sentimentality. To make his point, Renoir even turns to brutal overkill. Just before the big party that comprises the story’s second half is a graphic hunting scene. Rapid cuts show the slaughter of scores of birds and rabbits, many of them dying onscreen. The hunters seem like inhuman monsters as they blast the game while making small talk about the cute squirrels in the trees. The killing surely reminded audiences of the specter of war hovering on their doorstep. After that, the silly party games come off as pure decadence. Instead of a merry finale, the show ends with a conspiratorial cover-up by a corrupt class.
Everyone has their reasons.
Most of the excellent cast will be unfamiliar to casual U.S. film fans. Exception Marcel Dalio is instantly recognizable from Casablanca. He had a long French career apart from his many roles in American memorable films. The kittenish maid Paulette Dubost enjoyed a 70-year stretch in comedies and classics like Lola Montés. Mila Parély is remembered as the mean sister in Beauty and the Beast. Julien Carette, the poacher, is a funnyman from Renoir’s masterpiece Grand Illusion. The gameskeeper Gaston Modot was a fixture in French and Spanish classics by Buñuel, Renoir, Prevért and Julien Duvivier (Pépé le Moko). I believe he was the ‘hero’ who sucked the toes of Dita Parlo in Buñuel’s surreal shocker L’Age d’Or.
Consistently named one of the best pictures ever made, The Rules of the Game has been used as a model by filmmakers like Woody Allen, Blake Edwards and especially Robert Altman, whose Gosford Park now seems practically a remake. The French original is not an easy picture to fully comprehend on a first viewing, especially when too much of one’s attention goes to reading the wordy film’s fast subtitles. Even if some of it slips by, you know you’ve just seen something daring and original.
