Bonjour! Justin here with a movie you should put on your Netflix Watch Instant queue:
Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is one of my favorite movies even though I just discovered it a few months ago. Around our house, we try to have “Serious Movie Sundays,” because left to our own devices we end up watching a lot of glorious crap. The Rules of the Game was our selection one night. Usually we start Serious Movie Sunday by groaning and trying to convince each other to watch Death Wish 3 or Over the Top instead. So far we haven’t had a miss though - about 10-15 minutes in to the serious movie, we’re good to go. Watching great “films” that I actually enjoy always resuscitates my love of movies and makes me want to watch as many as I can get my hands on.
The Rules of the Game came out in 1939, but it is so modern in its sensibilities that you’ll forget its age in minutes. Renoir was one of the biggest influences on Robert Altman, and watching this is to see a blueprint for his frenetic style of employing a large cast, snappy dialogue, and characters that talk over each other. Many of the shots have an incredibly deep focus with action happening in the foreground and background. While the majority of the movie concerns itself with the class differences between the nouveau-riche, the aristocracy, celebrities, dependents, and the help as they interact at a hunting retreat in the woods of France, the mood is never stuffy or disinteresting. The primary concerns of the movie are identity, manipulation, friendship, and deception.
The story washed over me as I tried to hold the multiple plot threads and characters together. Before I realized it, I was completely overtaken by Renoir’s virtuosity during the famous hunting scene. After I had wrapped my head around that, the movie went into the stratosphere with the play within the movie. It’s hard to put into words exactly how strange and affecting it is. Honestly, I was completely dazzled by it the first time, and I didn’t even appreciate the full impact of it until it had sunk in a few days later.
Renoir constructs his movies in an interesting way. All the ones I have seen start out with a situation just on the plausible side of absurdity. After accepting that and suspending disbelief, everything seems very normal for most of the second act. At this point you’ve been lulled into a sense of security. You care about the characters and the plot, watching to find out what happens next - but then, blam! The movie takes an absurdist left turn and everything suddenly seems very magical.
I don’t want to give away or hype this movie too much more than I already have. The Rules of the Game is totally worth your time and respect. If you haven’t become acquainted with Renoir yet, you need to be. If you are familiar with his other movies, you should know that this one is awesome too. Instead, I’ll leave you with some insight into Renoir’s process. He was the primary architect of what was ultimately referred to as poetic realism, which of course sounds like an oxymoron. His aim with movies was to capture some piece of human truth with them. He was also the son of the impressionist painter Claude Renoir. Keeping that in your head, it is easy to see the same basic sensibility in presenting slice-of-life situations in a very romantic or dream-like way. That is also selling him somewhat short though. The Rules of the Game, and some of his other movies like The Grand Illusion and The River, can be watched without any subtext at all and be extremely well-done portraits of life. A deeper critical reading, however, pushes these far over the edge. The French new wave was a direct reaction to the poetic realism movement (best place to start here is Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless). Where Renoir tried to hide his editing, and not acknowledge the viewer, the new wave was constantly breaking the 4th wall and pushing viewers outside of their comfort zone with very deliberate and frenetic editing. Renoir, interestingly, dedicated his memoir to the new wave directors, particularly Godard and Truffaut and said that they all had the same aim with making movies - to show truth.
Magic Moment: There’s a shot of a rabbit during the hunting sequence. You’ll know it when you see it.
-Justin