We recently watched La Règle du Jeu at the local film club. Francois Truffaut, who like other nouvelle vague directors was  inspired and influenced by Renoir, called La Règle du Jeu ‘le credo des cinéphiles, le film des films’. I interpret this to mean something like the ‘manifesto’ of film making. But if it is, it is a difficult manifesto to interpret and it is difficult to be sure of Renoir’s intentions when he made the film.

Filming on La Règle du Jeu started in mid-February 1939, and was completed by the end of March. The film opened in Paris on July 8th 1939, originally in a 94 minute version. Although some critics recognised its importance, it was not well received by the public and was a commercial failure. Renoir re-edited it down to 81 minutes, but it was banned by the French government and subsequently by the Nazis. The original negatives were destroyed in an allied bombing raid in 1942, and the film had to be re-assembled after the war. The reconstruction, completed with Renoir’s help in 1958 by Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, was shown in 1959 at the Venice Film Festival. At 106 minutes it is longer than the version which opened in 1939. This is the version we have today.

The film does not allude directly to war and the current political situation. The Nazi regime invaded Czechoslovakia during March 1939, while the film was being shot. The Sudetenland, the German speaking part of Czechoslovakia, had been ceded to Germany in September 1938, provoking the Munich conference, and a year earlier, in March 1938, Austria had been annexed. But there are indirect allusions that contemporary audiences would have understood: the Marquis is Jewish and his wife Christine is Austrian. During the house party, the guests mock the soldiers drilling at Longchamp and think it fun to dress up in Tyrolean costumes. The Tyrol is the region around Innsbruck in Austria.

Renoir later called the film ‘un drame gai’ and for inspiration he drew on the tradition of French dramatic comedy that runs from Moliere through Marivaux to Beaumarchais, itself influenced by the improvisations of Commedia dell’Arte. Renoir asked his cast to improvise in the same manner. I didn’t know until I followed  up this point that it was originally the Commedia dell’Arte all’Improvisso, the comedy of the craft of improvisation. The caption epigraph at the beginning, in praise of the lightness of love, is from Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro. I think this gives us a clue to Renoir’s intentions, as Figaro is also a comedy of romantic intrigue played out in a wider political context.

The setting is the household of the marquis Robert de la Chesnaye; his wife Christine; his lover Geneviève ; his wife’s admirer Andre Jurieux, the aviator; Octave, the family friend and fixer; Lisette the maid; her husband Schumacher the game-keeper and her admirer Marcel the poacher. The location is initially in Paris and then at the Marquis’ country estate La Colinière, at Sologne in the Loire valley.

La Règle du Jeu is an ensemble drama. The eight principal characters are of roughly equal weight and that, I think, is a second clue that shows us how the film is constructed. It allows Renoir to create a picture of a world. The perspective is defined in the line he gives to his own character Octave: ‘tout-le-monde a ses raisons’, everybody has their reasons. With eight stories to tell, the action must progress quickly. As one plot progresses in the foreground, we see other plots progressing in the background. There is a scene where in the foreground we see a pianist and a trumpeter, and briefly in the background, we catch Christine drawing St. Aubin away, and her niece Jackie realising that maybe Jurieux might now change his affections to her. It is as quick and un-emphatic as any modern piece of cinema.

The requirement for speed and mobility determines the filming. Wim Wenders said that he hadn’t thought that the camera could achieve such weightlessness. Renoir uses a deep focus to allow the actors to move around as if in a solid space, and keep in focus one action happening in the foreground and another continuing in the background.

Renoir also took great care over how the film sounded. Apart from the opening music from Mozart’s Dance Allemande and the closing music from Monsigny’s Le Deserteur, every sound in the film is diegetic; it occurs in the film rather than being added as a soundtrack. The initial scene setting is done through a live radio broadcast from the Le Bouget air-field. Frequently the sound is produced by mechanical means; clocks, mechanical pianos, and so on. The Marquis collects musical contraptions. The one that he shows off at the party as his most recent acquisition and the pinnacle of his career as a collector is a calliope, a device that uses compressed air to produce sound. Renoir and Marcel Dalio, who plays the Marquis, later said that they took two days to get this simple shot exactly right.

Once we are down in the country, the film unfolds largely as two set pieces, the hunt and the party. Both are pieces of virtuoso film-making. The party occupies most of the second half and unfolds in real time. This sequence shows us an attractive but also frivolous and insincere society, portrayed satirically. On the other hand, the hunt sequence, which precedes and sets up the party, is, I think, extraordinarily bleak. And that bleakness can’t be put out of mind, however much we enjoy the intrigues and frailties of the house party guests.