Film: La Règle du Jeu
Director: Jean Renoir
Country: France
Released: July 1939
Runtime: 110 minutes
Genre: Satire
Studio: Gaumont
Influenced: Bergman, Truffaut, Robert Altman, Alain Resnais, Theo Angelopoulos, Mike Leigh
Renoir's previous film La Bête Humaine (1938) was a rare departure for him into the genre of thriller and film noir. French films of this era, in the immediate pre-WWII period, had become more gloomy in tone (see also Marcel Carné's Le Quai des Brumes), reflecting the darkening national mood. However, La Bête Humaine (starring Jean Gabin, naturally) was Renoir's biggest commercial success – and rightly so, it's brilliant – and showed that he could make a straightforward film that could win over audiences.
But his next project would be more experimental. Speaking about La Règle du Jeu, Renoir himself said that the film was the biggest failure of his life, and that he didn't intend to make a controversial film that would "épater le bourgeoisie" (shock the middle classes). He says he simply wanted to make a pleasant film that would critique a society that he considered rotten to its core. The film's loose inspiration was a short story by Alfred de Musset (Les Caprices de Marianne) and Renoir's artistic thinking was to return to a classical form of French drama – in the spirit of Molière and Beaumarchais – as opposed to the Zola-inspired naturalism of La Bête Humaine. The score is classical too, and the acting is in the heightened style of pantomime or commedia dell'arte.
A confession: I don't love this film. I appreciate it, but am not fond of the characters nor the (over)acting, and the satire has lost its power to provoke. This is the difficulty generally with satire in cinema, it can make a film feel dated – similarly, I haven't included in this blog either Buñuel's L'Âge d'Or (with its fiery satire of sexual mores) or Renoir's Partie de Campagne (with its gentle satire of middle-class whims) because the satire simply does not resonate with modern audiences. However, La Règle du Jeu deserves inclusion and praise for its technical innovations, such as the use of special lenses for widescale shots with enormous fields of focus, notably in the hunting scenes.
Critics also rightly praise the film for its uncompromising portrayal of antisemitism in all classes of society, from the aristocracy to kitchen staff, and this aspect of the film was particularly inflammatory to French audiences at the time. Despite the film's uneven tone, I do like the central idea of all of society gathering at a country house, going out for a hunt and then ending up hunting each other. There also some sublime scenes, notably the "play within a play" set to the music of Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns, where the film's farce and satire comes into sharper focus, mocking the self-involved and self-indulgent behaviour of European elites as they dance on the edge of the volcano that is WWII.
As Jean Renoir (playing Octave) memorably says at one point in the film:
"On est à une époque où tout le monde ment: les prospectus des pharmaciens, les gouvernements, la radio, le cinéma, les journaux! Alors, pourquoi, veux-tu que nous autres, les simples particuliers, on ne mente pas aussi?"
"It's a sign of the times – everyone lies: pharmacists, governments, radio presenters, film directors, journalists! So why shouldn't simple people like us lie too?"
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