The Rules of the Game (1939)
Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game”
Thematic Elements:
In 1939, Jean Renoir utilized the haut French society that surrounded him for his satirical comedy of manners, “The Rules of the Game.” It is a film that takes place at a large chateau for a wealthy upper-class couple, their affluent guests, and the various house and grounds servants around a rabbit hunt.
We begin our story at a landing strip full of media and press as they welcome the arrival of Andre Toutain, an aviator who has just crossed the Atlantic and has just been branded a ‘hero’. The chaos of the crowd sets a particular tone for the film. There is a lot of excitement about this hero aviator and this newfound technology he has arrived in. It is a society who is reaching out for this high level of excitement, anxious to see this spectacle. While being interviewed by the press, Andre announces that he is not excited about his accomplishment because his lover, Christine, was not present to greet him at his landing. Rather than being proud of his impressive accomplishment, he is upset and disappointed. His friend, Octave, tells him later that he should not have been so vulnerable about his feelings in front of everyone. He tells him that he should have played by the rules of gratitude and been appreciative of the opportunity to acquire this impressive feat. Christine on the other hand does not feel upset about her lack of showing up as she is not entirely head over heels for Andre. Christine and her husband Robert live in the before mentioned chateau, full of extravagance, wealth, and power. Both Robert and Christine live such luxurious lives that it makes them bored. This boredom creates a need to act on impulsive behaviors. Robert wants to leave Christine for Geneviève, but he also is jealous of Christine’s relationship just as Christine wants to leave Robert for Andre and at one-point Octave but is jealous of Robert’s relationship. Both characters seem to not know what they want, as they are just reaching for something, anything to make them happy. However, nothing ever actually satisfies them. They are in a perpetual state of unhappiness because they have acquired so many things that nothing can satiate this restless boredom.
The behavior of the servants mirrors the behavior of the masters. While Robert and Christine are both having an affair with two separate people, Lisette is having an affair with Marceau, even as her husband Edouard is fully aware of her deceit. The servants cannot help themselves but behave in the same manner as the masters. Marceau is a poacher who has just taken up a position at the chateau. However, once he joins the ranks of the other servants, he descends into erratic behavior. Rather than being grateful for the opportunity to make money, he cannot help himself but to clamor for something more and overindulge on his impulses. None of the characters can seem to overcome their impulses. Christine keeps switching between men and cannot seem to be satisfied with any one of them. She simply wants someone to sweep her off somewhere, content with whoever is in front of her that will do so. Robert too wants someone else that will satisfy him, never actually becoming satisfied with any scenario or person he chooses. Lisette cannot help but behave impulsively by having an affair with Marceau. Marceau cannot help but chase after Lisette even though it dangers his newfound secure employment. Edouard cannot help his impulses to kill Marceau for his affair with Lisette as Edouard chases Marceau throughout the chateau firing at him, even though this impulsive behavior will negatively affect his employment as well. Andre cannot help his impulses to be emotional and act out his inner self, as he displays his intimate feelings with the world via radio and crashes his car when he is depressed. Octave cannot help but string together relationships and behave silly and foolishly as the clown to the people around him, spanking people and weaving and manipulating people to pick certain choices. Geneviève cannot help her dramatic nature as she is fainting constantly, and even erratically convulses over the sound of the gun going off. All of the characters are chasing impulses to make them feel more alive as the astounding amount of comfort and abundance they live in creates an environment in which nothing can ever really satisfy them. Their impulses simply serve as a method for filling the empty void they feel created by lacking feeling of not actually lacking anything. Even the servants who do not possess the finances and material wealth that the masters have are empowered by the abundance around them, as they live vicariously in the same setting that creates this materialism.
The characters are so numb to the world around them that they treat death with the same apathy in which they treat life. The apathy of life around them has created in these characters a need to reach out for something material and exciting – something they can use to fill the void created by boredom. This apathy towards life is equal to their apathy towards death. The macabre theater performance that is put on rings of themes of death - the characters dance around in skeleton outfits as the audience rings out with applause (many of the main characters are too wrapped up in their own desires that they do not even notice the performances). The death of Andre at the end of the film doesn’t seem to affect Christine or Robert very much at all, as Christine urges the ladies to ‘put on a grave face’ because people are watching, and Roberts delivers a standard excuse for the murder and brushes it away as just a simple accident. This is even true with the rabbit hunt. The characters are not even hunting the rabbits; they live in such boredom and comfort that they simply drive the rabbit out of a thicket and just shoot at them as they pass by. Even their hunting comes with immense dullness. Robert uses the rabbit hunt to kill off as many rabbits as possible – not for the sake of hunting, but for the simple fact that he just doesn’t want them around because they are taking from their already abundance estate. This culling of the rabbits is incredibly prescient of what was to come in Europe. Renoir pairs this desire to cull life that is ‘intruding’ on their abundance with the anti-Semitic resentment presented by the French society around them to allude to a dangerous and prescient reality that overcame Europe after the film’s release. The indifference of the life around them and even of death creates an extreme danger to anyone incidentally treading on their selfish way of life.
Not only are the characters restlessly acting out every immediate impulse, but they are also playing by rules. The characters seem to have a created this stagnant and restless society due to this particular game they have set up and the rules that occupy the game. Renoir, who is known in his oeuvre to showcase the illusion of society, presents in The Rules of the Game this very illusion as well. In this film, it is the illusion of there being any rules at all. Every character has different rules that they follow while also trying to keep up with the rules of others. This set-up by its very nature cannot keep itself standing up – as every rule cannot be followed and the varied rules of the individual clash with another. Because each person is playing by their own rules, each person must lie and manipulate in order to satisfy their individual needs. As Octave says, “Today everyone lies. Pharmaceutical fliers, governments, the radio, the movies, the newspapers.” Because everyone in this society is playing by their own rules, everyone must lie to maintain their reality. Andre says the rules indicate that he must inform Robert that he is leaving with Christine, however those rules clash with Robert as the two of them begin to scuffle and fight. Christine believes that the rules should indicate that she can have as many lovers as she wants to, however, she is told the rules clash with hers. She disregards these rules in favor of her own, as all the characters do. The rules of the masters are such that they must be compensated on every whim, due to the rules of hierarchal economics. However, even these rules begin to lose all meaning when Edouard is running through the house with a firearm. Robert screams at him to stop, saying that he is the master and must be listened to. But these rules crumble before Edouard’s rules that he must kill Marceau for sleeping with his wife. Everyone’s rules clash with each other to such an extent that the very fabric of the structure the ‘rules’ are based on begin to shatter completely. As Octave says, “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” This notion that everyone is playing by their own rules and reasons indicates they everyone is selfishly out for themselves, which creates a sense that everyone will lie, cheat, and take advantage of each other in order to satisfy their own desires. Renoir has orchestrated a world with this utterly terrifying notion that society is out for itself, purposes to please itself, has a complete disregard for anyone else, and even has complete apathy for life itself and even death. The world that Renoir creates in this film is the world he was living in France in 1939. Renoir depicts (as he says), “a society dancing on a volcano.” – which erupted two months after the film’s release with the beginning of World War II. The Rules of the Game depicts this contemporary society as reckless and selfish, as so bored with their own abundance that they can never have enough to satisfy themselves, as so apathetic towards their own existence that life and death become altogether meaningless. It was a society that Renoir knew was destined for an apocalypse.
Another aspect of the film seems to be deeply personal to Renoir, as he suggests that the way this society currently behaves drastically affects the artistic pursuit of the character her plays (a proxy for Renoir). Renoir plays Octave, who’s father was a famous orchestra conductor, who even played for the king. Octave throughout the film mentions that he wishes he could reach an audience with something truly artistic like his father was able to. This directly mirrors the real Renoir, who’s father was Pierre-Augustus Renoir, the world-famous painter. Octave muses at the nostalgia of seeing his father perform on a grand stage, something Octave feels he never lived up to. The performance piece that Octave and the fellow houseguests put on was something Octave felt proud of, however, his friends’ selfish pursuits of their own indulgences caused them to completely disregard the art they were taking part in, even leaving Octave alone in his bear costume. Perhaps Renoir uses Octave as a mechanism for metatextually presenting his frustration with his art and films against the backdrop of an apathetic society. Perhaps The Rules of the Game is Renoir’s sweeping effort to wake up the society he portrays in the film, and even vent his own frustrations about the effect of his own work and his own insecurities about wanting to create something that actually reaches out and speaks to people. The Rules of the Game certainly felt like an attempt to do so.
Camerawork:
Light and Darkness: This first scene takes place shrouded in the darkness of night; you would believe that the visual representation of darkness would cover up such vulnerability. Most filmmakers would utilize night or darkness to cover up true intentions or mask vulnerability. However, in this film, Renoir does the opposite. Renoir uses the darkness to lay bare truths about the characters and uses the brightness of the interiors of the chateau to demonstrate the way in which characters lie and cover themselves with falsehood. This is evident when the first scene of the aviation landing switches from the darkness of the night in which Andre is speaking about his disappointment to the brightly lit room of Christine who is listening to him on the radio. Renoir switches from a scene full of a lacking control – the chaos of the crowd, the frenetic energy of the noises, and the lack of control exhibited by Andre in regards to his emotions and true feelings - to a scene full of feigned control – the organized nature of the room and space, the control Christine exhibits over her servants, and the control Christine has over emotional vulnerability.
Throughout the film, Renoir continues to do the same with the brightness of the interiors and the shrouded darkness of the interiors. Renoir uses the brightness of the lit interior as if to suggest that this setting is a stage, one in which you are playing a role. The darkness allows the characters to shed their roles and reconcile with their own emotional vulnerabilities and state of minds. All of the characters breaking down emotionally take place outside in the dark away from the ‘stage’ and the ‘lights’. Octave goes out onto the front entrance to emotionally remark about his art and his father, whereas inside the house he was manipulative and silly. Christine displays emotional vulnerability with Octave in the greenhouse, even though she behaves selfishly in the chateau. Edouard cries at the loss of Lisette out by a tree in the front entrance, even though he behaves erratically in the house, trying to exhibit control over Lisette and harm to Marceau. Marceau behaves with sympathy for Edouard even as he behaved with reckless abandon trying to seduce Lisette even though his job was on the line. All of the characters seem to behave in a much more human way when they are away from the bright lights. Perhaps the lights and the white brightness of the extravagance of the interior of the chateau relates the materialism that everyone feels intoxicated by. This visual representation of the material world creates a psychosis in the characters that enacts them to behave with material and selfish extravagance. But it could very well be more likely that it is the visual representation of the light and dark, as there are scene that take place outside away from the chateau that are brightly lit by the daylight, like the hunting scene for example.
Deep Focus: Two years before Orson Welles revolutionized American cinema with his deep focus in Citizen Kane, Jean Renoir mastered deep focus in The Rules of the Game (as Welles was an avid admirer of Jean Renoir and even called La Grand Illusion the greatest film ever made). Throughout the film, characters are presented in the foreground while another character appears just in the background. The background action of characters in the frame are meant to undermine the actions or dialogue of the characters in the foreground. An example of this is a scene in which Robert and Andre are walking through the room towards center right of the camera as they discuss Octave being a good friend. However, Octave appears in the background of the frame as he emerges in the hallway, off to try and steal Christine from both of them. The foreground discussion is completely undermined by the background actions of Octave. This technique amazingly creates a visual communication with the audience about the lies, deception, and selfishness of the characters. As characters are saying one thing, actions are completely negating the things in the film actually being said.
Visual Space: Renoir uses the visual space of the chateau in the film to create larger open spaces for the characters to exist in. This visual space creates a metaphorical space for the characters to behave with such reckless abandon. The screen opens up allowing the characters to physically embody the act of behaving erratically and restlessly. The larger the room the camera creates for the character, the more abundance is created – this abundance is the seed igniting the behavior the characters exhibit. As characters being to feel more confined to rules and regulations of their behavior, the camera will begin to close them into the frame, trapping them more by behavioral control.
Best Shot:
There are two important shots in the film in which the first one is connected to the second. In the first shot, Octave is telling Christine about the time his father led the orchestra as he demonstrates at the top of the stairs. The context of what Octave is saying along with the framing of the stairs seems to suggest the top of the stairs is meant to represent a stage. The stage that Octave’s father was performing on and the stage that Octave was never able to reach. (Cont..)
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