The Enduring Power of “The Rules of the Game”

Even if Mozart’s name and a quote from Beaumarchais’s play “The Marriage of Figaro” didn’t feature in the credits of “The Rules of the Game,” this 1939 film by Jean Renoir would still be the closest thing to a Mozart opera—indeed, to his “Marriage of Figaro”—ever put on film. Which is to say that “The Rules of the Game,” released less than two months before the outbreak of the Second World War, is a vision of looming catastrophe, of authoritarian menace from within as well as from without, and of the diabolical complicity of France’s privileged classes, both aristocratic and bourgeois, in depravities committed in their name and their interest. “The Rules of the Game” exuberantly overflows with some of the most sharply aphoristic dialogue in the history of cinema, as exemplified by one of its widely quoted epigrams: “The awful thing in this life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Under Renoir’s direction, the cast speak their lines nearly musically, with theatrically expressive inflections, while also conjuring a high-wire sense of spontaneity.

Author: Richard Brody

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