The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu)
It’s rare to want to see a movie again as soon as it’s over, but Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece is so elusive, so fast-moving, that you feel as if you couldn’t possibly have caught it all. I’m not the only one who feels this way. Critics have been dazzled and overwhelmed by “Rules” for decades. I’m among them, but I feel, after seeing it once some years ago and again recently, that it has not entirely revealed its magic to me. I’m confident, however, that one day it will.
The setup is simple enough: Aristocrats, hangers-on and servants converge on a French country house for a shooting party on the eve of World War II. At the center is a love quadrangle involving Christine (Nora Gregor), a delicate but earthy Austrian married to a French aristocrat, and the three men who love her: smitten, petulant aviator André Jurieux (Roland Toutain); roly-poly buddy-to-all Octave (Renoir himself); and Christine’s sly, unfaithful husband, Robert de la Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio). Each of them gets their chance to win Christine’s heart, but Renoir makes clear that in this complicated and morally compromised milieu, love and good intentions are not enough. Renoir reveals the goings-on with a prismatic humanism, exemplified by an active, roving camera that, like the characters, is searching for simple truths amid the inscrutable behavior. Renoir veers confidently between action and emotion, farce and tragedy. “Rules” is a satire but it’s also a messy, honest and paradoxically hopeful work of art. Octave, the most lovable character, is not spared a soul-deep examination: he’s paralyzingly eager to please and desperate to retain his tenuous bond to the aristocracy. The pressure of his circumstances render him largely impotent, yet the goodness of his heart is never in doubt. “Rules” is always entertaining, yet there’s always a mood of danger and sadness. Even when Renoir stages a silly, door-slamming chase sequence, he suggests that nothing is as simple as it looks.