Jean Renoir, 1939
[12 votes]
“Jean
Renoir's The Rules of the
Game has been part of the film canon for so long that it's
valuable to remind audiences how gloriously alive and just plain fun it is. Low
comedy walks hand and hand with tragedy and beauty throughout; the film is
frothy one minute, nearly apocalyptic the next, and so you're never fully
allowed to gather your bearings. The Rules of the Game has a tone that could be
symbolized by the escalating merry-go-round that prominently plays into the
climax of Strangers on a
Train—up and down, all around and seemingly totally out of
control. The film, as Paul Schrader once wrote, represents all of cinema's
possibilities in 106 minutes.
“The
heart of Renoir's genius was his gift for hiding that genius. Expertly
controlled, The Rules of the
Game plays as one huge happy accident that might've been
caught on the fly over the course of a long drunken weekend. Everything is just right, and
the performances and individual moments are so remarkably alive that you accept
the elaborate structure and symbolism as organic. The film is really about the
potential destruction of society. But The Rules of the Game is so graceful with its volley
of character trade-offs, both romantic and platonic, that you can't help but
fall in a kind of love with it, a qualified love that still understands the
sourness, the sadness, that gently informs every part of the film. We come to
see the characters and their lifestyles as a tragic charade. The rules of the
game are arbitrary stabs at pretend morality that can foster truly immoral
behavior, as the rules of the game twist people up and confuse them. And the
confusion that these games (ones we've never abandoned) inspire, which feeds
into an unending inner regard, can destroy us.
“Even
people who love The Rules of
the Game, indisputably one of the greatest movies of all time,
can overlook its toughness, which is, as an essayist once acknowledged, even
obvious in the fashion that most people misquote the most famous line. As
Octave, Renoir never said, ‘Everyone has their reasons,’ a sentiment that
implies a certain benign, detached understanding of foible. Octave says
something far tougher to entirely resolve: ‘The awful thing about life is this:
Everyone has their reasons.’” ~ Chuck Bowen
“It appears that, if
only as a result of Hitchcock and Ozu’s increasing stature, Renoir has lost
some. His consensus masterpiece, 1939’s The
Rules of the Game, has only Grand
Illusion to contend with, a fine film that nonetheless falls short of Rules’ technical virtuosity, tonal
delicacy and philosophical breadth. It's unique among canon favorites for its
employment of broad farce, a large, protagonist-free ensemble and cunning
vacillation between comedy and tragedy in which a jokey linguistic distinction—e.g.,
Octave’s substitution of ‘adieu’ for ‘au revoir’ to
infatuation-object-slash-pal Christine—can become a severe measure of romantic
love, when Genevieve instructs her spurning lover Robert how to say goodbye.
“For much of the
film’s running time, ostensible lead Andre Jurieux is disregarded, giving way
to an awe-inspiring, intricately choreographed stretch playing the fallout of
his rejection off its marginally more slapsticky, servant-class mirror, the
Lisette-Marceau-Schumacher love triangle. Perhaps, given certain post-recession
critical trends, it doesn’t help Rules
that its rep as a searing takedown of the upper class is reductive at best: its
clearest display of childish vanity, Robert’s presentation of a gigantic music
box, resonates with sympathetic heartache, and his suppression of the movie’s
most explicitly resentful figure of poverty, Schumacher, comes with no small
relief. But it’s also doubtful that Renoir would stand by his own character’s
famous proclamation that ‘everyone has their reasons,’ since that statement, a
shameless appeal to another character’s moral relativism, indirectly
precipitates the movie’s heartbreaking finale. By so seamlessly dovetailing
humanism and social criticism, Rules
is triumphantly neither.” ~ Sky
Hirschkron
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