La Règle du jeu 1939

La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) is Jean Renoir's 1939 comedy-drama about a weekend house party at a country château, where the guests and the servants play out their love affairs according to rules everyone knows and nobody believes in. It begins as a comedy of manners and ends in a death. When it opened in Paris in July 1939, a few weeks before the Second World War, audiences booed it, one viewer is said to have tried to set fire to the cinema, and the film was cut, then banned. After the war it was rebuilt from surviving material, and since the 1950s it has been named again and again as one of the greatest films ever made. It rewards a second viewing more than almost any film of its time.

The weekend at La Colinière

The aviator André Jurieux has just flown across the Atlantic. Landing at Le Bourget, he tells a radio reporter he is heartbroken because the woman he did it for, Christine, has not come to meet him. Christine, played by the Austrian actress Nora Gregor, is married to the Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye, a Jewish aristocrat who collects mechanical toys and is trying to end his affair with Geneviève.

Octave, a friend of everyone, played by Renoir himself, persuades Robert to invite André to his estate in the Sologne for a hunting weekend so that the scandal can be smoothed over. Below stairs, Christine's maid Lisette is married to Schumacher, the jealous gamekeeper, and flirts with Marceau, a poacher whom Robert has just hired as a servant.

The hunt and the party

The hunt is the centre of the film: a line of beaters drives hares and pheasants towards the guests, who shoot them down in a steady rhythm. Animals twitch and die in close-up. It is impossible not to read it as a picture of a class that kills for pleasure and calls it tradition.

That evening the guests put on a costume party with a performance, a dance of skeletons and a mechanical organ. Meanwhile every couple falls apart. Schumacher chases Marceau through the rooms with a revolver while the guests take the gunshots for part of the show. Renoir keeps several stories going in the same shot, upstairs and downstairs, in the foreground and through the doorways.

Why it was a disaster in 1939

French audiences on the eve of war did not want to see their ruling class shown as frivolous and their servants as no better. The cast also included foreign and Jewish actors at a time of rising xenophobia and antisemitism. After the premiere Renoir cut the film himself to try to save it. The government banned it in October 1939 as demoralising, and the occupation authorities kept it banned.

The original negative was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid during the war. In 1959 two film enthusiasts, Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, worked with Renoir to assemble a version from many surviving elements. It was shown at the Venice Film Festival that year and is the version we see today, missing only one short scene.

How to watch it

The first viewing can be confusing: many characters, much talk, sudden changes of tone. Do not try to follow everything. Watch how Renoir's camera moves through the château and lets people enter and leave the frame, and listen to Octave, whose famous line says that the terrible thing in this world is that everyone has their reasons.

If the film feels hard to approach, start with Renoir's warmer La Grande Illusion, then come back to this one. Both appear in our list of the 100 best French films, and you will find the decade's other classics in the best French films of the 1930s.