...Jean Renoir's La Regle de Jeu ranks among my favourite classics, alongside Citizen Kane, Rio Bravo, and Renoir's war film La Grande Illusion. Like Citizen Kane, it's a critics' favourite that really is super-entertaining. I can't think of a single flaw with this film. The narrative flows beautifully, the performances are all fantastic and real, and Jean Renoir's direction balances comedy and tragedy, complexity and simplicity, chaos and order beautifully and effortlessly...
Very different in terms of story and character to La Grande Illusion but thematically quite similar, it's about the tragic contradictions and irrationality of human behaviour and the collapse and folly of the bourgeosie lifestyle. The story concerns a number of characters who meet up at a rich man's chateaux in the French countryside. It opens with the arrival of a hot shot pilot who has just crossed the Atlantic in record time. The press swamp him and congratulate him but he has a look of longing and disappointment on his face for the woman he loves has not arrived to greet him. She is "Madame," the wife of the rich man, very much the opposite of the pilot; gaudy and showy. The character central to the events and clashes of the film is Octave, played comically by Jean Renoir himself. He is loved by all and so his life is empty, he rushes between characters, helping everyone but ultimately failing to uphold any order. He is sad yet strong, a large, gruff bear with good intentions. He orchestrates a meeting between Madame and the pilot so that the pilot can reclaim her from the rich man. And from here we follow a host of other characters around the vast, seemingly infinite corridors of the chateaux, including a feisty but faithfuly female servant, an equally feisty poacher-turned-servant played by an actor from La Grande Illusion, can't remember his name, who has a fling with her, the ex-lover of the rich man, and various other characters. They are filmed with an almost constantly mobile camera, tracking them and making them seem like kids in a play-room, endearing yet pitiful, and somewhat mad. Another actor from La Grande Illusion, who also played the persecuted man who infiltrated bourgeois society in Bunuel's thematically similar L'Age D'Or, plays a fiery hunter and guard of the chateaux, who when faced with the prospect of his wife, the feisty servant, being stolen by the poacher, goes mad with anger, leading to his being thrown out of the chateaux and his emotional breakdown. There is conflict and confrontation in literally every frame of this film; it's a very noisy and busy film. People fight and take sides, double-cross each other, much like in a children's game, but have rules of etiquette they follow, as do children in a schoolyard. The people in this film are very real, and Renoir the brilliant writer holds deep empathy for every one of them, snapping between different points of view and filming each character internally. They chat and make small-talk, and put on facades, as is the tradition of their lifestyle, but so often find themselves lost, staring at their feet. They are broken, and disgraceful, and funny, jumbling around in a kind-of bourgeois apocalypse, with shows and ghostly ceremonies symbolising the death and emptiness of this lifestyle. But through the sacrifice of the pilot at the hands of the unknowing guard who thinks he's Octave who's running off with his wife, order is restored, and the bourgeious retreat back into their comforts, hiding from the oncoming conflict known as the Second World War. So the bourgeious values of pleasure and politeness result in the temporary downfall of a country at the hands of the Nazis. Indeed this film was banned by the Nazis, who saw it as "demoralising," as with La Grande Illusion. Both films are about humanity and the tragic contradictions and orders and barriers that plague it. In La Regle de Jeu there is a tour-de-force sequence, in which rabbits and chased out of woodland by men, only run into the line of fire of Madame and her guests. Madame deliberately misses. She is the object of desire for the pilot and her husband, and at one point of her best friend Octave. In the end one of the men is chased towards her by his desires and finds himself in the line of fire of the emotionally shattered guard. The slaughter of the rabbits is something of a precursor to this, a kind-of genocide. The rabbits run in the open and it is sheer luck that any of them survive. The characters in this film are rabbits, blinded by desire and fear, and shot down by life, victims of the bourgeious lifestyle...
The film has no heroes or villians, Renoir didn't think that way. Rather than attacking people, it attacks the circumstances of their lives; the bourgeious institution. It is a warning against the glutton and idleness of this lifestyle. It is passionate and energetic, and one of the best films ever made; dark yet light, walking a tightrope between madness and meaning; an absolute dream of a film.
As Octave would say, "there is one thing that is terrible, and that is everyone has his reasons." That is the tragic meaning at the heart of this film...
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