Barnes & Noble

Elegant, funny, and profoundly pessimistic, Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece Rules of the Game is widely considered one of France's greatest cinematic exports. With the help of Carl Koch, Renoir -- son of the Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir -- adapted Alfred de Musset's "Les Caprices de Marianne." Set during a weekend house party in the country, this tragicomic farce explores class differences and sexual peccadilloes, featuring Roland Toutain as a pilot in love with a woman (Nora Gregor) who is married to an aristocrat (Marcel Dalio). The film remains a landmark for its ensemble construction, exploring the relationships among its characters in a fashion that continues to influence such prominent filmmakers as Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson. Renoir's visual style consists of camera movements that glide easily between actors and deep-focus photography that highlights the characters' environment. It all combines beautifully to express the film's central theme: the social code of behavior that connects us to one another while simultaneously keeping us apart. Monica McIntyre

All Movie Guide

Now often cited as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu/Rules of the Game was not warmly received on its original release in 1939: audiences at its opening engagements in Paris were openly hostile, responding to the film with shouts of derision, and distributors cut the movie from 113 minutes to a mere 80. It was banned as morally perilous during the German occupation and the original negative was destroyed during WWII. It wasn't until 1956 that Renoir was able to restore the film to its original length. In retrospect, this reaction seems both puzzling and understandable; at its heart, Rules of the Game is a very moral film about frequently amoral people. A comedy of manners whose wit only occasionally betrays its more serious intentions, it contrasts the romantic entanglements of rich and poor during a weekend at a country estate. André Jurieu (Roland Toutain), a French aviation hero, has fallen in love with Christine de la Chesnaye (Nora Gregor), who is married to wealthy aristocrat Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio). Robert, however, has a mistress of his own, whom he invites to a weekend hunting party at his country home, along with André and his friend Octave (played by Jean Renoir himself). Meanwhile, the hired help have their own game of musical beds going on: a poacher is hired to work as a servant at the estate and immediately makes plans to seduce the gamekeeper's wife, while the gamekeeper recognizes him only as the man who's been trying to steal his rabbits. Among the upper classes, infidelity is not merely accepted but expected; codes are breached not by being unfaithful, but by lacking the courtesy to lie about it in public. The weekend ends in a tragedy that suggests that this way of life may soon be coming to an end. Renoir's witty, acidic screenplay makes none of the characters heroes or villains, and his graceful handling of his cast is well served by his visual style. He tells his story with long, uninterrupted takes using deep focus (cinematographer Jean Bachelet proves a worthy collaborator here), following the action with a subtle rhythm that never calls attention to itself. The sharply-cut hunting sequence makes clear that Renoir avoided more complex editing schemes by choice, believing that long takes created a more lifelike rhythm and reduced the manipulations of over-editing. Rules of the Game uses WWI as an allegory for WWII, and its representation of a vanishing way of life soon became all too true for Renoir himself, who, within a year of the film's release, was forced to leave Europe for the United States.. Mark Deming

Product Details

• UPC: 037429180624
• Source: CRITERION
• Aspect Ratio: Pre-1954 Standard (1.33.1)
• Presentation: B&W
• Sound: Dolby Digital Mono
• Language: Français
• Subtitles: English
• Time: 1:46:00
• Sales Rank: 6,225

Features:

DVD MENU