Reviews: "Rules of the Game"; "An Unreasonable Man"

By Michael Fox

Renoir’s “Rules” sparkles like new.

There is much to savor about the restored print of “The Rules of the Game,” by this critic’s reckoning the greatest film ever made, but perhaps the most unexpected and thrilling aspect is Jean Renoir’s incomparable pacing. The movie hops and bounds, sprints and pirouettes, slowing imperceptibly near the end to let us to catch our breath before delivering a devastating gut-punch. “The Rules of the Game” is a perfectly gauged “dramatic fantasy” of breathless ironies, but French audiences in 1939 were in no mood for irony, farce, tragedy or, especially, self-examination.

The German war machine was primed and eager, while France hadn’t yet healed from the last war. Moviegoers arrived at the premiere in need of a pep talk and a patriotic back-slap. What they got was a dissection of the niceties and self-deceptions that comprise the facade of urban society. Further, Renoir had the audacity to open with a pilot climbing out of his cockpit after a brave Transatlantic solo flight while the crowd cheers, then moping like a dope when he learns that Christine (Nora Grégor), the woman he has a crush on, isn’t there. What kind of a hero is that? The audience all but booed the picture off the screen, and a recut version was no better received. Renoir’s bad luck continued during the war: The original negative was destroyed, and only substandard copies of the abridged work survived.

“The Rules of the Game” is an ensemble piece that, on its surface, is about the romantic entanglements of a group of wealthy folks and their servants. Most of the plot unfolds at the country estate of the Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye (the splendid Marcel Dalio), a modern man who so detests borders that he has an Austrian wife (the aforementioned Christine) and vetoes the fences his groundskeeper proposes to keep rabbits out. Every honorable gesture the marquis makes turns out badly, with comedy inevitably turning to catastrophe. The film pivots on a shockingly brutal hunting scene, which foreshadows the toll the war will take on innocents.

The film’s reputation was saved in the late ’50s, when Renoir’s version was reconstructed and exhibited. But many of the bits were in bad shape, and prints were marred by poor visual and sound quality. Criterion tracked down a master that it used for its 2004 DVD release, and embarked on a digital restoration that led to the newly struck print that is, frankly, a revelation. On a TV screen, subtitles obscure a good bit of the frame, but on the big screen we can fully appreciate the exquisite dance that Renoir orchestrates between actors and camera.

One small example: Christine (and the pilot

03.06.2007