The Enduring Power of “The Rules of the Game”

Even if Mozart’s name and a quote from Beaumarchais’s play “The Marriage of Figaro” didn’t feature in the credits of “The Rules of the Game,” this 1939 film by Jean Renoir would still be the closest thing to a Mozart opera—indeed, to his “Marriage of Figaro”—ever put on film. Like Mozart’s Beaumarchais adaptation, Renoir’s film portrays crisscrossing romantic entanglements both among and between high society and the hired help, the elaborate ruses deployed to conceal them, and the mayhem that results when the truth comes out. Like the opera, the film blends these disparate moods and tones at a whirlwind tempo: slapstick comedy and poignant melodrama, graceful lyricism and bumptious braggadocio, witty satire and bitter tragedy. (The movie, in a 2021 restoration, is enjoying a brief run at the Paris Theatre, in a series called “Punch Up: Uppercuts to the Upper Crust,” starting August 1st; it’s also streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

Yet calling “The Rules of the Game” Mozartean would be faint praise if Mozart’s opera weren’t understood in its full potency: “The Marriage of Figaro” (like “Don Giovanni”) is a fiercely indignant denunciation of the aristocracy’s predatory power, which is embodied in the crime of rape. Count Almaviva seeks to exercise droit du seigneur over his wife’s maidservant, Susanna, who is betrothed to his valet, Figaro. The couple joins forces to outwit the Count, whose ultimate exposure leads to a more general unmasking—of a regime of lies, of oppression both by class and gender (women of various statuses being harassed, betrayed, or duped), and of relationships warped by submission or resistance to unjust authority.

Likewise, in “The Rules of the Game,” Renoir boldly undertakes an often rollicking, always sly, yet passionately indignant vision of French society of its time, which he sees as rotting under the weight of a social order that’s designed to protect privilege of many sorts. Renoir’s film also hinges on sexualized violence, albeit differently from that in “Figaro.” Here the overlords do not wield violence themselves but quietly condone it for the sake of preserving the order on which their privilege rests. Which is to say that “The Rules of the Game,” released less than two months before the outbreak of the Second World War, is a vision of looming catastrophe, of authoritarian menace from within as well as from without, and of the diabolical complicity of France’s privileged classes, both aristocratic and bourgeois, in depravities committed in their name and their interest.

As with Mozart, Renoir’s overt effervescence offers a fanciful tour of a charming hell on earth—and tempts viewers with its seductions. The story, inspired by Alfred de Musset’s play “The Caprices of Marianne,” from 1833, is both intricate and simple, with clear but manifold relationships giving rise to complications through the overlapping conflicts of personal interests and social norms. To summarize it is to marvel both at the refinement of Renoir’s narrative juggling and at his conceptual audacity in catching the mighty storms of history in such romantic filigree. A famous young pilot, André Jurieux, is in love with a refined Austrian émigrée, Christine, who is married to an aristocrat named Robert de la Cheyniest. Robert has a mistress, a Parisian socialite named Geneviève, but ends the affair because he worries that he could lose Christine to André. He and Christine are hosting a weekend hunt, with attendant festivities, at their château, in the Loire Valley; a friend of theirs, a former musician named Octave, exhorts them to invite André, both to establish the innocence of Christine’s friendship with him and to cool the young man’s reckless ardor. Meanwhile, downstairs, another plot unfolds involving Christine’s maid, Lisette, who’s married to Robert’s gamekeeper, Schumacher. Robert impulsively hires a poacher named Marceau, who is Schumacher’s nemesis, as a domestic servant; once in the château, Marceau brazenly pursues Lisette, arousing Schumacher’s violent jealousy.

The political implications of the movie are inscribed in the film itself and in its notably checkered release history, which is painstakingly tracked by Pascal Mérigeau, in his fine biography of Renoir. Renoir made the movie—his twenty-second, and his thirteenth talkie—independently, with his own production company, and it was released on July 8, 1939, at a run time of ninety-eight minutes. This version is lost. Renoir, stung by bad reviews and poor box-office results, cut the film drastically while it was still in release, removing eighteen minutes from it; then the original negative was destroyed by Allied bombings during the Second World War. But in 1959, as a title card in the 2021 restoration mentions, Renoir participated in a reconstruction of the film from footage found in various places. This version, which is the one shown now, was very close to Renoir’s original, pre-release version, effectively a director’s cut, now running at a hundred and seven minutes. The title card for the 1959 version, still on view in the 2021 restoration, declares that, though the movie is “set on the eve of war,” its characters are nonetheless purely “imaginary.” Of course, Renoir only surmised the coming of war, unfortunately accurately. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and, two days later, France declared war on Germany.

Nonetheless, the politics of that bland-sounding 1959 statement about the movie’s character are jolting. Why would Renoir downplay the film’s relevance and perceptiveness? The answer is that France at this time was attempting to heal its wartime wounds, papering over the cracks in the social fabric that had opened up during the German Occupation and positioning itself as a nation of resisters, in which collaborators had been few and aberrant. One of the methods by which France did so was the censorship of movies. When Alain Resnais released his Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog,” in 1955, he was forced to obscure an image of a French gendarme guarding a concentration camp. “The Rules of the Game” doesn’t mention any political figures, but it alludes to the division underlying the Occupation and its depravities: antisemitism.

Robert is a marquis, inheritor of an ancient title of nobility, who nonetheless has German Jewish ancestry, something that attracts the attention of other characters. His own chauffeur haughtily refers to him as a métèque, a derogatory term for an immigrant, and his chef, noting that the subject of discussion is, specifically, Jews, praises the Marquis’s culinary refinement, says that he’s a gentleman “even though he’s a métèque.” What’s more, Renoir emphasizes Robert’s identity by casting the suave and ebullient Marcel Dalio, born in Paris as Israel Mosche Blauschild. (He was soon to win fame in Hollywood as the croupier in “Casablanca.”) The very antisemitism that Renoir underscores with the dialogue and the casting was partly responsible for the film’s commercial failure: right-wing viewers, aware of Renoir’s left-wing politics, came out to boo when Dalio was onscreen, and rightist critics sniped at the character, too. Meanwhile, the plot-pivoting rage of Schumacher—whose name Christine pronounces as if it were German—suggests a barbed allusion to the militaristic wolf at France’s door.

The manifest contentiousness of “The Rules of the Game” emerges in yet another twist of history noted by Mérigeau. The 1959 restoration was released in London in 1960, in New York in 1961, but in Paris only in . . . 1965. Renoir’s title-card disclaimer had not immediately reversed the film’s fortunes in France, but now its achievement finally began to be recognized, with the critic Jean de Baroncelli writing, in Le Monde, that “its revolutionary force is intact.” It’s a surprising but apt observation—because unlike such films as “Citizen Kane” and “Breathless,” what’s revolutionary about “The Rules of the Game” isn’t a matter of form but of politics. The movie’s startling originality is in its spirit, its insolent ironies. As for its form, that starts and stops with Renoir himself—because it’s shaped to fit not only a particular historical moment and a particular idea but also a particular realm of experience—namely, the director’s own. It’s revolutionary like “The Marriage of Figaro,” an opera that, properly heard, should leave a spectator wondering why its first audiences, in Vienna in 1786, didn’t beat the French by three years in overthrowing the aristocratic regime. Likewise, the 1965 release of “The Rules of the Game” must have left Baroncelli wondering why 1968 wasn’t already happening.

Although Renoir asserted that his characters were imaginary, he was very familiar with the world he was depicting. As a son of the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, had access to the French beau monde without being of it, and he’d seen its ugliness long before war loomed. He depicts his characters’ reckless frivolity, the mores that bind them together in a sort of conspiracy of falsehood and self-deception, with an almost documentary eye. The temptation of emphasizing the social critique and the political fury of “The Rules of the Game,” as of a Mozart opera, over its aesthetic is strong because its perfection almost annoyingly surpasses description. Perfection isn’t precision—what’s exact in “The Rules of the Game” isn’t technique but tone and mood. Whereas lesser works leave seams and gaps within which critics can tear and probe and find what they’re looking for, “Rules” simply is—so fully and completely itself that it seems to exist beyond criticism.

The characters’ traits are psychologically astute, sociologically resonant, and dramatically explosive, but it’s Renoir’s comprehensive artistry—the casting, the performances, the dialogue, and the dramaturgy—that make them seem like archetypes in a modern mythology. For starters, the movie’s story emerges in action with a wide range of styles that suggest a cinematic compendium to match its variety of human types. That striking range includes a meticulously observed attention to physical context. André’s landing at an airfield near Paris after a daring transatlantic flight has a documentary quality, combining the drama with a newsreel-like display of the making of the live radio broadcast about his heroic feat. And, famously, the hunting party at the center of the film involves the killing of real animals (hundreds of them, according to Mérigeau). The drama is often bracingly straightforward; characters declare their motives and enact their plans with brusque directness. There is also spectacular ornament and pageantry, alongside a tumultuous sense of rowdiness about to erupt—fisticuffs, slapstick chases, and daring combinations of hapless antics and true danger. Cleverly developed scenes of suspense clash against sinuous ones that evoke intricate schemes and deep-rooted traditions, which Renoir emphasizes visually by making foregrounds and backgrounds converge. Elsewhere, he flaunts a graphic near-abstraction that catches horror with detachment, as when André drives his car off the road in what Octave calls a suicide attempt.

“The Rules of the Game” exuberantly overflows with some of the most sharply aphoristic dialogue in the history of cinema, as exemplified by one of its widely quoted epigrams: “The awful thing in this life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Under Renoir’s direction, the cast speak their lines nearly musically, with theatrically expressive inflections, while also conjuring a high-wire sense of spontaneity. The actors are kept invigoratingly busy but also have the kind of presence that can fill the screen en passant, in gestures and glances delivered with the lyrical power.