Rules of the Game (France, 1939, Jean Renoir) AKA The Rape of the Flock

--Life is a game my boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.
--Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.

Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.

---Holden Caulfield, enfant terrible of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye

Rules of the Game is, of course, a brilliant film. Director Jean Renoir’s story looks at the misfortunate attempts by a small clutch of wannabes and frustrated lovers to find their place among the "in" crowd. But while they may try desperately to find happiness in love, they are doomed to never claim membership in the world of privilege, because they are not able to play these people’s game. At its essence, Rules of the Game is equal parts Calvin Ball and Catch-22, where those who are in the game know the rules, and even change the rules to suit their liking, while those on the outside who observe the action and want in the game aren’t allowed to play precisely because they…don’t know the rules of the game.

Often cited as the crowning achievement of Jean Renoir’s considerable cinematic career, The Rules of the Game sticks its nose into the petty lives of the ‘hot shots’ that Holden refers so bitingly to in Salinger’s despairing tale of teenaged angst and anomie. While Holden’s dismissal of those w/ lives of privilege (a life he shares the fruits of, btw) comes from a place of bitterness and depression, Renoir’s barbed and pointed satirical jabs are, tonally speaking, more in the whimsical vein of Pope than the bilious spirit of Swift.
Skating along the thin edge of a precipice, where if he faltered for even a moment, the delicately snarky mood would slip over the edge into vitreous, Renoir places his troop of actors in a series of interconnected love triangles that expose the decadence of the bourgeois class as well as the sociological differences between rich and poor in interesting and subtle ways—a few simple gestures and quiet affectations clue us into the distinctions that determine these character’s varying fates.

The film’s centrepiece, temporally and morally, is the rightfully famous hunt. The stated reason for the get-together of these clueless snoots, the hunt is a merciless slaughter. A la a weekend with Dick Cheney, servants are sent into woods to spook the pheasants and bunnies out into the open, where they are mowed down in graphic detail. The hunting ground becomes an abattoir. The symbolic purpose of the hunt is blatant; the carnage wreaked by the aristocrats is both literal and metaphorical. This hunt, however, is merely prologue to the REAL sport, the pursuit of amore, which occurs after dinner.

Surrounded by mechanical toys—these folks don’t even play their own pianos; they have machines to take care of that--and works of art that range from classical to gaudy, all appropriated from the world that they’ve contributed nothing to but their good manners, we are looking at parasitic lives that, like their possessions, are built entirely on efforts of others. And into this world stumbles Andre Jurieu (Roland Toutain), a young aviator, who crosses the Atlantic to impress his married lover, but discovers she is not at the airstrip to greet him when he lands. The hero responds most imprudently by publicly upbraiding her as disloyal, thereby breaching the rules of polite society, the titular "rules of the game." This marks the jumping off point for a critique of the empty self-involved lives of the upper classes that is disguised as a charming comedy of manners, but quickly erupts into a war of wills and a clash of social distinctions. These are sensualists for whom love is a "mingling of two whims and the contact of two skins" that causes so much distress not because of the emotional ramifications, but proprietary ones. Jurieu may seek a place at their table, and use his accomplishments as a calling card, but he is and always will be an outsider in this world of privilege. While his aviation achievements may make him a hero with the great unwashed, they carry little weight in the realm of the snoots. In fact, all this attention-drawing behaviour is so desperate and unseemly; in a world where technological progress is seen as evidence of exhibitionism, discretion is the better part of valour. The many characters’ moral relativism is pervasive; these aristocrats have no tenets or ethics beyond self-interest. And as they fiddle about, Europe is--quite literally—about to burn.

Renoir may regard these upper class twits as recklessly vapid, but his camera--and the deep-focus photography that allows us, quite literally, to keep this large cast in focus throughout--well, it does love them so. Indeed, what is remarkable about the film is how Renoir, despite his famous declaration that none of these people are worth saving, manages to get us to care about his characters and their frivolous, self-involved and hedonistic lives. No small part of the credit for this must go to the cast of uniformly terrific actors, though I must proffer particular and specific accolades on Nora Gregor, who plays Christine in a striking, Garbo-esque performance that most-convincingly centres the film’s key love triangle (which turns becomes a quadrangle before the lights come up), as well as Jean Renoir himself, who plays the court jester-like Octave, a man of distinction but no money. Roaming freely between the worlds of the servants and their masters, Octave is key to maintaining the film’s predominantly gently-mocking tone. Yet, midst all the playfulness and friendly banter between them, there’s a pervasive sense of uneasiness. Christine, who is described as a "dangerous angel," appears to be quite unhappy with her life, while Renoir’s Octave, described as a "dangerous poet," who, despite his earthy and ribald commentary on the stories shenanigans, is an unhappily lovesick fellow himself. There are no content or enlightened characters here, only those existing in various states of unfulfilment.

Renoir later noted that the film was his "biggest failure," a complete and resounding flop that neither the public nor critics had much use for. His stated purpose was to make a "pleasant film" that poked fun at the foibles of the leisure class, which he considered "rotten to the core." He believed that this class, in sharp decline, would make a fine subject for study because, despite their advanced state of decay, its members refused to wear masks, making their deterioration a matter of public record and private elation (for Renoir, at least). The prescience of the film, which anticipated the disintegration of this particular brand of social privilege in a world about to be radically altered by the upcoming world war, may lead some to mistake The Rules of the Game for some quaint but anachronistic parlour piece, gentle reflections on a world long departed. However, not only would that be to severely underestimate the film’s cutting attack on its decadent world, but it would also indicate a grievous misunderstanding of the way our world is still ordered today. If folks don’t recognize that there is still a yawning gulf between the world of the privileged and the impoverished, and that the gap grows larger every day, well, here’s hoping that the prescription on those rose-tinted glasses runs out real soon.

Score: 94/100