LA REGLE DU JEU/The Rules of the Game (1939)

Many years ago I developed an aversion to Jean Renoir's LA REGLE DU JEU. It was a totally unreasonable aversion. For no particular reason I got it into my head that I didn't want to see it. Very odd, because generally I adore the films of Jean Renoir and you'd think I'd want to see a film that his regularly listed among the top dozen films of all time. Anyway, last night I sat down and watched it. On the surface it seems to be a typical French farce. A group of idle rich gather at a big country chateau for a shooting party. A mixture of husbands, wives, lovers, servants etc. There is lots of cheating, seduction, slamming of doors and running up and down the corridors of the chateau. Farce it may be but it is a dark one, brilliantly engineered by Renoir to show the decadence and shallow morality of the upper classes that, figuratively, fiddle while Europe burns. We start by laughing at these sad people but soon become aware that virtually every word they speak, every action they take, are lies, deceptions totally based on the "Rules" of their worthless society. Although it is never mentioned the shadow of the approaching war hangs heavy over the film and the long sequence of the slaughter of the rabbits prefigures the coming massacres. The inspiration seems to be Beaumarchais stories of the factotum Figaro (represented here by the poacher Marceau) and just as those stories unsettled the ruling class of the day so Renoir's film was banned by both the French goverment and the invading Germans and most copies of the movie were destroyed - including the original negative. Luckily various bits of the film survived and with Renoir's help it has been reconstructed with, according to the director, the loss of only one minor scene. A masterpiece? Undoubtedly. But, having said that, I couldn't warm to the film and didn't really enjoy it. Rating *****