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,
No comments:
Post a Comment