The Rules of the Game
La règle du jeu
Jean Renoir (1939)
The Rules of the Game premiered in Paris, in July 1939, to a vociferously hostile audience. Few press reviews were wholly favourable and the film fared poorly at the box office in the weeks following its opening – the dual setback an unpleasant surprise to Jean Renoir, whose 1930s pictures usually flourished commercially and critically. At a time when war in Europe was increasingly seen as inevitable, Renoir’s skewering of the French upper classes and the social hierarchy that they headed, by way of satirical comedy, was widely considered ‘frivolous’ as well as ‘unpatriotic’. Renoir kept cutting bits from the film – from its original 113 minutes down to 85 – but to no commercial avail. In October 1939, The Rules of the Game was banned in France on the grounds that it was ‘depressing, morbid, immoral [and had] … an undesirable influence over the young’. In 1942, the original negative was thought to have perished in an Allied bombing raid that destroyed the G M Film Lab in Boulogne-sur-Seine. Soon after the end of World War II, which Renoir had spent on the other side of the Atlantic, a print of his most abbreviated version of the film was found and a new print made from that. It was ten years later, in 1956, when a French film restoration company, which had acquired the rights to The Rules of the Game, tracked down boxes found on the site of the G M Film Lab. These contained negative prints of the film, as well as duplicated prints and sound mixes. A process of restoration, in which Renoir, now back in France, was involved, began: the restored version, missing only one scene from the version that opened in Paris in 1939, was shown at the Venice Film Festival of 1959. Critical reappraisal of the film, in its 85-minute form, had been gathering momentum for some years before then. The release of the near-complete original sealed its reputation, which The Rules of the Game has never since lost, as a classic.
The early scenes are set in and on the outskirts of Paris: at Le Bourget, where aviator André Jurieux (Roland Toutain) receives a hero’s welcome home after a trip across the Atlantic and back in his plane; and in Paris apartments, including that of André’s lover, Christine de la Cheyniest (Nora Gregor). Her absence from the crowds at Le Bourget so distresses André that he tells a radio reporter (Lise Elina) as much, and censures Christine – in a live broadcast that she hears in her apartment while she dresses for the evening, attended by her maid, Lisette (Paulette Dubost). Both women are married: Christine to Robert, Marquis de la Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio), Lisette to Schumacher (Gaston Modot), the gamekeeper on the Marquis’s country estate, La Colinière. Whereas Christine has been having an extra-marital affair (a thing of the past, as far as she, though not André, is concerned), Lisette is devoted not to her husband but to her aristocratic employer. Robert, well aware of his wife’s fling with the aviator, has a mistress of his own, Geneviève de Marras (Mila Parély). He tells Geneviève he must end their relationship but nevertheless invites her to a weekend gathering at La Colinière. Renoir (who also wrote the screenplay) efficiently contrives to assemble all his key characters there: they also include, among others, Christine’s niece, Jackie (Anne Mayen), and Octave (played by Renoir himself), a droll, seasoned pillar of Parisian high society and friend of both Robert and Christine. Octave persuades André Jurieux to join the party: if he and Geneviève are attracted to each other, Octave reckons, this could relieve both Christine and Robert of their persistent paramours – could, to use a phrase apt in view of what happens on the country estate, kill two birds with one stone.
The remaining action, which is the lion’s share of the film, takes place at La Colinière. Much of the plot there is catalysed not by a guest but by an intruder, the poacher Marceau (Julien Carette), who trespasses onto the estate to retrieve a rabbit caught in a snare. Schumacher apprehends Marceau and is about to eject him when Robert happens to intervene. Marceau shoots a line that he’s good at catching rabbits; Robert gives him a job on the estate; once he’s in the house, Marceau, to Schumacher’s fury, starts flirting with Lisette. As the romantic intrigues and deceptions multiply, Renoir stages two remarkable set pieces – a shooting party and a masked ball. During the latter, new liaisons are born and old flames rekindled: Christine decides to elope with André. After an extended episode of zany chaos in the house – Schumacher chasing Marceau and threatening to shoot him is at its centre – the film’s climax is focused on a secluded greenhouse on the estate, late at night. It’s here that Octave declares his love for Christine, who is already having (second) second thoughts about André. Schumacher and Marceau, both fired instantly by Robert for wreaking havoc in the house, keep watch on the greenhouse; by now, Schumacher suspects Octave, rather than Marceau, of having designs on Lisette. Christine decides on a different elopement, with Octave; when the moment comes, he loses his nerve and sends André back out to her. Earlier in the film, when Schumacher proudly presented his wife with a cape and hood that he’d bought for her, Lisette was ungratefully sniffy about the outfit but, on this chilly night, insists that her mistress wear it for her outing to the greenhouse. Octave lends his overcoat to André. Schumacher can just about make out in the darkness two figures whose clothes identify them as Lisette and her latest seducer. The gamekeeper shoots the man dead. In the closing sequence, Robert, in characteristically off-the-cuff fashion, gives Schumacher his job back. They return to the house as Octave and Marceau walk off into the night. The Marquis will report André’s death to the police as an unfortunate accident.
The film’s vicissitudes in its early life, though a significant part of its cachet, aren’t enough to obscure its intrinsic excellence. The performances, decidedly but consistently theatrical, are highly accomplished. Renoir’s orchestration of the various elements – the ramifying comedy of manners; the entertainments staged at the masked ball (including a skeleton routine, accompanied by Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre); the series of automata in the Marquis’s collection, each one that we see more disturbing than the last – is masterly. So too the camera movement (the DP was Jean Bachelet), especially in conveying the crazy, escalating momentum of the ball and what’s happening at its margins. Those automata both hint at the aristocrats’ blithe heartlessness and underline the sense of people playing parts in a social machinery. Octave wears a bear costume for the ball; the sequence in which he struggles to remove it is eloquent. The crucial shooting party scenes are as shocking as they’re brilliantly conceived and edited (by Marguerite Renoir, the director’s partner but never his wife, though she took his name). The nobs wait while their army of servants drives into range pheasants and rabbits that inhabit La Colinière. Needless to say, numerous animals and birds were actually killed in the process of filming the hunt, including, unforgettably, a wounded rabbit that shakes its scut and flexes its legs as it dies.
Marceau’s description of André’s death – ‘He dropped like an animal in the hunt’ – is a rare over-explicit line in the script but the hunting episode came to acquire a far larger and horrifying human application. The animal carnage on the estate has been linked, in retrospect, with what Nazi Germany did to all those they deemed sub-human. Whatever the merits of that comparison, Renoir seems not to have been averse to the idea that The Rules of the Game presages the imminent World War. On-screen text introducing the restored version of the film announces an ‘entertainment, set on the eve of the Second World War …’ – which leads into a roguish disclaimer that the piece ‘does not claim to be a study of manners. Its characters are purely fictitious’. (This is followed by lines from Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, the source material of Mozart’s opera, in which – in a reverse of the Christine-Lisette costume confusion – the servant Susanna, Figaro’s bride to be, disguises herself as the Countess Rosa Almavina.)
I have to admit I find The Rules of the Game more admirable than engaging. There are two reasons (in addition to the spectacular animal casualties) why I don’t enjoy it much. First, a limited appetite for frenzied farce action, however well choreographed; second, the people in the story. Renoir has been quoted as saying that he ‘depicted pleasant, sympathetic characters, but showed them in a society in the process of disintegration’. Even if social conditioning has shaped the dramatis personae, all but three of the major ones are hard for this viewer to like. One of the exceptions is the ill-fated André, and he’s inoffensive rather than appealing: it may or may not be a coincidence that Roland Toutain is a relatively bland presence in this high-powered cast. The more positive exceptions are Gaston Modot’s understandably jealous Schumacher and the clownish but melancholy Octave, whose rueful perceptiveness is the moral heart of The Rules of the Game. It’s right that Jean Renoir plays him.
3 March 2023