The Rules of the Game (1939)

If The Rules of the Game had been made in the US, it would have been a lighthearted screwball comedy, or a slightly melancholy and extremely talky film by Robert Altman. But this film is so typically French in its idiosyncratic shifts of gears, from amiable to ominous to comical (I think of a much later example of this cinematic style: The Barbarian Invasion) Jean Renoir's comedy seems to hint at social critique (the title gives that much away) but it is not clear to me what the nature of this critique is. The relations between people is seen as a monumental network of social roles that people are predisposed or take on themselves to inhabit (Renoir's use of deep focus brilliantly embellishes these networks that we sometimes only see somewhere in the background of the image; everything happens as it were at once, on an overwhelmingly vast social scene). One or two of the character seems to be placed outside this "game". There are a multitude of characters here and the romantic entanglements are endless. The major part of the film takes place in a manor in the countryside where ar party is celeberated: first as a hunting party and then as an evening bristling with tensions and scheming. Among the quests are an anti-heroic, brooding aviator, a family friend and a mistress (along with servants, game-keepers and a poacher). All of them jump from 'earnest' to 'artificial' in a split second, and it is hard to know what is what; everything seems to be moves within an endlessly volatile game that seems to make up a world in itself, indifferent to everything else that goes on around it. The hunting scene is intriguing to watch. Some of the participants are not interested in hunting; they loll about, talking about their messy relations. Other again are involved in shooting at everything that moves, without discrimination. The cruely and strangeness of this upper-class ritual is captured in a single frame of a dying rabbitt. This is one of the very few moments in which we see another approach to reality than that of "the game". The Rules of the Game is a hodgepodge (a thrilling one) of slapstick, endless and overlapping talk (often idling and empty phrases) and a few explosive moments which in the end are not explosive at all, because they are mere parts of the game, which seems to allow for these kinds of continuous eruptions. But what is the point of the film? What is Renoir's ideas about the social system captured in this film (a system in which both the upper-class and the servants seem to take part in the "game", whatever it is)? Something seems to be foreshadowed, but I can't really pinpoint what it is. I am not sure, but The Rules of the Game won me over with its strange mix of rawness and elegance.