A Capricious Masterpiece

Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) was voted the third greatest film of all time by an international group of critics for a 1962 Sight and Sound poll, and the fourth greatest film of all time by a 2012 panel of critics and scholars brought together by the British Film Institute. This fabled masterpiece is widely regarded as the greatest French film by a master French director, and decade after decade hangs on to its hallowed place at the summit of world cinema.

The hunt. Mila Parely

Apart from its standing with the experts, La Règle du jeu is in just about every movie lover’s Top Ten. It’s as rich an experience as you are likely to have in a theater; you’ll never see the movie’s neoclassical sources of continental theater performed with as much shattering brilliance. Renoir and his team (which included Henri Cartier-Bresson as an assistant) infuse centuries of high comic tradition into a Modernist farce that only appears as if it were spinning out of control. In fact, it’s a completely controlled tragicomedy in which chance, or fate, is the prime mover.

Just about every social or cultural anchor—love, honor, class, even classical distinctions between literary genres—is dismantled in La Règle. The title is doubly ironic: the social classes abided by their rules in prewar Europe, love had its rules, comedy and tragedy had their rules. Renoir smashes these rules into pieces. La Règle in 1939 points the way to the absurdist strain in Modernism. The animal hunt is a shocking, profound visualization of the slaughter during the Great War and the slaughter to come—warfare on land (the rabbits) and in the air (the birds). (When Germany marched into Czechoslovakia in March 1939, several of Renoir’s technicians left the filming to join the army.)

The idea of the disintegration of class distinctions, of class relationships teeming with infidelity and jealousy, had been dramatized in Musset (whose Les Caprices de Marianne Renoir used as a springboard), Beaumarchais, and Molière. In La Règle, ignobility is society’s great leveler (the way cats all seem to be the same color at night), much as you find it in Enlightenment theater traditions. But the movie pounces on the modern: civilization itself becomes a witches’ sabbath in which sentiment is juxtaposed with raunchy sex chases, heroes (like the hapless aviator) are turned into victims of mischief, and the intricate organizing impulse of society itself crumbles into a mayhem of poaching (both animal and sexual). In earlier French literature, immoral and moral were binary opposites, but in La Règle it’s the revelrous commingling of the immoral with the amoral that drives our experience. That’s what makes the movie so absolutely modern, and so sustaining. Like the Shakespearean comedies, this Renoir masterpiece lets us peer more deeply into our social and sexual selves.