La Regle de Jeu (The Rules of the Game)

Directed by Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir’s 1939 Rules of the Game, in revival at Film Forum, was never a popular foreign film but always a critics’ favorite. Anyone who cares about movies needs to see it to recognize exactly why it stands the test of time. It comes down to the famous line: “The horrible thing in this life is that everyone has their reasons.” But Renoir didn’t argue for moral relativism (the excuse people gave to dismissing a film as great as Spielberg’s Munich). The rejoinder, “And I’m all for their free expression,” is equally important. It is the acceptance of people’s diverse, strange, idiosyncratic, humane, even hurtful reasons that made Rules of the Game a prime example of film art.

Today, so few filmmakers follow Renoir’s dictum that it’s a question whether Rules of the Game rules anymore. In a do-as-you-please culture, filmmakers and critics can excuse promoting inhumanity and even artistic slovenliness (like Borat). Does the fact that Rules of the Game has been restored in a significantly re-worked print that improves on Criterion’s 2003 DVD version matter anymore? In a year when both Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann manipulate imagery and audience response toward the delectation of cruelty, Renoir’s fascination with manners and heartbreak, social corruption and disappointment might seem wack.

There are several yardstick movies—Intolerance, Citizen Kane, Sansho the Bailiff, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, L’Avventura, even Renoir’s A Day in the Country—but the only competition for Rules of the Games’ vastness and depth would be Robert Altman’s 1975 Nashville. While Renoir gave theater (French farce) the spontaneity and realism of cinema—and this was crucially important to mid-20th century critics seeking to define movie art—Altman does it even more so, adding American pop consciousness. Nashville has a sense of e pluribus unum, which enlarges Renoir’s liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Appreciating Rules of the Game today also means confronting the fact that its longstanding critical status was partially an aristocratic choice. It was hailed for being Mozartean rather than pop. That’s a just evaluation: We must appreciate the changes in social and moral perception that post-Renoir pop art made possible. What hasn’t changed are the painful love games that Renoir’s masterpiece exposed.