The result was The Rules of the Game, a dazzling accomplishment, original in form and style, a comic tragedy, absurd and profound, graced by two of the most brilliant scenes ever created. It is also, in the words of Dudley Andrew, "the most complex social criticism ever enacted on the screen." A total failure in 1939, The Rules of the Game now ranks as one of the greatest masterpieces of world cinema.

Through the 1930s Jean Renoir had worked on the margin of the French film industry, exploring aspects of contemporary French society while developing a style in opposition to that which emanated from Hollywood and dominated the film world. Renoir ranged his actors in deep space; long takes in deep focus with a movie camera allowed them to move freely in this space, gave them time to seek and achieve convincing characterization. Then, in the late '30s, intent on creating rhythm and balance within complex narrative structures, he began constructing his films of matched opposing pairs, a form which helps bring coherence and resonance to these complex structures.

As he mastered this style, Renoir's social commitments deepened. He became, in the mid-30s, the film director of the Left; his protagonists often working class rather than bourgeois. Still, for all his mastery, his films were seldom comercial hits. Then two big successes, La Grande Illusion and La Bte Humaine, encouraged him to act out a dream -- to form his own production company wherein he could work when and as he pleased. The Rules of the Game was the first film by this company, the most expensive and ambitious French production of 1939.

As he wrote the script Renoir called the film "an exact description of the bourgeoisie of our time." He was so confident in his vision that he started shooting with only one third of the script complete. "In reality, I had this subject so much inside me, so profoundly within me, that I had written only the entrances and movements, to avoid mistakes about them. The sense of the characters and the action and, above all, the symbolic side of the film, was something I had thought about for a long time. I had desired to do something like this for a long time, to show a rich, complex society where -- to use an historic phrase -- we are dancing on a volcano."

For his dancers he finally chose no big stars, but talented supporting players, old friends like Dalio, Gaston Modot and Carette, with an unknown Austrian princess as his leading lady, Christine, and filled out the cast with amateurs such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Jean Renoir himself in a major role as Octave, the meddling court-jester for the idle rich. Consequently, it is impossible to identify the central character in The Rules of the Game. "There is none," Renoir said. "The conception I had from the beginning was of a film representing a society, a group. I wanted to depict a class."

The class, of course, is the haute bourgeoisie, the upper middle class whose blindness and intransigence had helped create the hopeless situation of Europe in 1939. To reveal the folly and the tragedy of that class and of his time, Renoir derived his action from two French classics, Musset's Les Caprices de Marianne and Beaumarchais' Le Mariage de Figaro, then shaped it in matched opposing pairs. For characters he began with four from Les Caprices de Marianne: jealous husband, faithful wife, despairing lover and intervening friend. Doubling this group then yields the central opposing pair in The Rules of the Game, two matched sets of husband, wife, lover, mistress and friend, one set among the masters, the other among the servants, thus evoking one of Renoir's perennial themes, the relation among classes.

Luxurious townhouses define the social setting of the film and two remarks reveal its moral climate: " 'Love in society; it's the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.' 'On this earth there is one thing which is dreadful. It's that everyone has his reasons.' "

Everyone has his reasons, but in The Rules of the Game the reason is always the same: I love her/ him. The difference lies in the acts each character believes this reason justifies. They range from suicide to murder.

Once his central opposing pair is formed, Renoir isolates his characters in the swampy beauty of the Sologne, France's hunting country, where their game of love becomes a danse macabre through the halls and glittering salons of the chateau La Colinire, with the dancers changing partners as they go -- a surreal scene which modulates from joy to despair, from burlesque to tragedy, as the bourgeois world spins out of control. Richard Roud calls this scene "an astonishing combination of lengthy shots to create an effect of vertiginous simultaneity."

The centerpiece of Renoir's intricate structure, the pivot on which the action turns, the symbolic core of his critique of French society, is the hunt, the scene which most clearly reveals the volcano that seethes beneath the dancers. In a film whose shots often run for a minute or more, here 51 shots take less than four minutes in a mounting rhythm of cutting and movement which culminates in that awesome barrage of gunfire as, in 22 shots -- 53 seconds -- twelve animals die. Surely one of the most powerful scenes in all of cinema.

Though the world of the film seems at times sheer chaos, The Rules of the Game, seen whole, is lucid and as precisely constructed as the Marquis' mechanical instruments. Unfortunately, the Parisians of 1939 never saw it whole. Later in his life Jean Renoir could laugh as he pronounced The Rules of the Game "a magnificent flop, perfect, complete" for by then his "frivolous drama" was hailed as a masterwork. But in 1939 he was not amused. The distributor had cut eight minutes from Renoir's final cut before the film's release and at the premiere, the Parisian audience howled and whistled and threw things at the screen. In a week, ten more minutes had been cut from the film but audiences still hooted. In a few more weeks the exclusive opening run ended; this most ambitious production of the year had quickly become a commercial disaster. Renoir was so discouraged, he thought he must either give up cinema or leave France. He did leave for Hollywood a year later to avoid working under the Nazi occupation, leaving the film to its fate.

Booed, banned, nearly destroyed, The Rules of the Game was restored to its original form in 1959. Thus viewers of this disc are afforded a privilege available to no one when the film was new, that of seeing The Rules of the Game as Jean Renoir intended it.
-- ALEXANDER SESONSKE

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