Stylistic & Political Analysis of La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game): A Discussion on Theatricality, Style and Political Aspect of the Film

La Regle du Jeu (1939, Jean Renoir) shows us the impossibility of escape from social relations. Renoir's cynicism to produce a plot that is about the ruling class on the edge of the catastrophe creates the implicit critic of swapping roles between masters and servants. Three influences stand out; Marivaux, Beaumarchais, and Musset. The pattern of wife, husband, and lover adds parallel to love affairs in two different classes, and the theatricality of the plot revolves around the struggle to survive in the middle of the chaos for the class of upper bourgeoisie: "It is more faithful to examine the film in terms of an alternation between order and disorder, which accentuates the repeated failure of social cohesion" (Sesonske, 427). The impossibility of assembling several groups which have no shared project except deceit and destruction draws our attention to the rules of acting, as the theatrical motif: " Robert's final mendacious speech, delivered from a stage-like platform to an audience, consecrates the final triumph of the theater over truth"(O'Shaughnessy, 148). The presence of war and death in using guns against people as well as animals beside the theatrical roles and the game-playing of the film put emphasis on the blending of theater and reality: "Even as Schumacher fires live bullets at Marceau, card games and dancing continue, murderous intent being taken for part of the shadow by an audience that can no longer distinguish theater from reality" (O'Shaughnessy, 149). The upstairs and downstairs with tremendous irony embody an unequal society in which the potential for political change and ideological revolutionary movement are doomed to collapse. Even the capacity for anti-Semitism is evoked while the second song is sung by characters that their costumes and wigs suggest that they are orthodox Jews.

Despite or perhaps because of critique of a whole society, the film provides contrast between the gender relation ships and the confinement of Christine(Nora Gregor) suggests that the men try ironically to defend patriarchy, as O'Shaughnessy states, " The finale sess a closing of male ranks in any case as the errant women are brought under control..."(O'Shaughnessy, 151). The film undoubtedly signals the end of Renoir's political commitment. Renoir's Popular Front films imply the possibility of renewal by opposing theatricality with decadent social order. The confinement of mise-en scene of Chateaux echoes the close spaces of dominant class and reverses the vitality that revolutionary disorder and chaos of freedom impose on the prejudice and pretension of the ruling class. The forces that attempt to unify the disparate individuals of the house are fragile because they all try desperately to reassert the order that relies on the theatricality of reality. The pessimistic representation of the ruling class through Renoir's social concerns with the limitations of lower class society defines a social world in which people hunger for rules not values: " La Regle du Jeu embodies a social world in which there are rules but not values. If you don't know the rules, you are crushed; but if you know the rules, you are cut off from your own nature...La Regle du Jeu presents a society that has refined feelings to the utmost, in order to starve off the demands of time and history" (Brandy, 132). Chesnay's love for mechanical toys relates him to desire to control the time and history and entertain the world. Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) desperately attempts to protect a society that is not authentic anymore because of alienation of isolated individuals: "But what Le Chesnaye tries to preserve as a society of harmonious aesthetic style is in fact a congeries of isolated individuals, each in his or her own world, the masters separated from the servants, the aware from unaware, the passionate from unmoved" (Braudy, 133).

The political stuggle in popular Front period represents that the radical social transformation is possible, but Renoir, by directing La Regle du Jeu, Suggests that this change could be for the worse. French higher class's egotistical irresponsibility in the film to face with the external threat jusr before the beginning of the Second World War presents a microcosm that symbolizes a counter-revolutionary ideology against the emergence of fascism. The similarities between masters and servants in terms of representing the theatricality of social order foreshadows lower class's political death, and the destruction of hopes that Popular Front promises leaves a pessimistic and cynical mood on Renoir's feelings: "The end of his love affair with the common people and with popular culture leaves him with nowhere to turn, for his alternative audience, the wealthy bourgeoisie, is the main target of his savage assault on French society" (O'Shaughnessy, 150). Renoir's intention in playing Octave's character in the film can be considered as a kind of self-portrait in which he attempts to mock with his professionalism as the director and his political career as the defender of left wing during Popular Front period: "Octave(Jean Renoir) is a character from outside the usual social order...Octave thinks of himself as a coward. All his life he says, he has been too cowardly to dare any responsibility or difficulty, but he has been content instead to float along with the social tide" (Braudy, 134). Octave who always intervene in every dramatic moment is prosperous to hide his feelings until near the end of the film: "The character of Octave, with his substitution of scial stability for personal feelings, subtly criticizes his idea of total accessibility to all experience...If La Chesnaye is the benevolent imposer of order, Octave is the go-between, subordinating his own nature for the fancied good of others and the harmony of his little world"(Braudy, 134-135).

Renoir's taste for long takes and a mobile camera as well as depth of field is significant to follow  fragmented Hollywood style of analytical editing through the whole film, as Renoir tells in his interview with Labarthe: " It is the depth of field. For that, Bachelet[director of photography] and I ordered some special lenses, very fast lenses, but ones that still gave us considerable depth, so that we could keep our backgrounds in focus almost all the time" (Volk,192). The lack of focus on any particular character in the film is very strong idea that relates only to Renoir's obsessive concern on relationship between individuals in multistage format of mise-en scene, and Renoir's camera does not simply record the dramatic relationships, but it focuses on the abstractive layer of moral and emotional signs of situations in depth of field, as Bazin states: " Jean Renoir's pictorial sense is expressed above all in the attention he pays to the importance of individual things in relation o one another...Renoir, like his character, quickly forgets the act in favor of the fact" (Bazin, 84). Renoir's camera is invisibly wandering throughout the salons and corridors, and its mobility reveals the presence of the people and the protagonists who are in the relationship together on the screen, and the function of the framing is to unfold the reality: "Renoir, on the other hand, understands that the screen is a mask whose function is no less to hide reality that it is to reveal it. The significance of what the camera discloses is relative to what it leaves behind" (Bazin, 87). Of course for Bazin, the reality of the scene can be only emerged and signified by technical explanation of composition of depth and camera movement: "But the function of depth of field is not only to allow more liberty to the director and the actors. It confirms the unity of actor and décor, the total interdependence of everything real, from the human to the mineral" (Bazin, 90). Not surprisingly, Renoir explains his desire for deep focus in the famous Le Point Article: "The farther I advance in my profession, the more I am inclined to shoot in deep focus. the more I work, the more I abandon confrontations between actors neatly set up before the camera, as in a photographer's studio. I prefer to place my characters more freely, at different distances from the camera, and to make them move. For that I need great depth of field..." (Renoir, le Point Article). If Bazin's word alludes to the possibility of Renoir's influences on Welles's visual style in Citizen Kane, later on, Bazin inaugurates a new critical awareness of Renoir's editing: : His editing does not proceed from the usual dissection of the space and duration of the scene according to preestablished dramatic formulae. rather, it follows the dictates of his roving eye, discerning, even if occasionally distracted or willfully lazy" (Bazin, 87).

From the stylistic point of view, the rapidity of the actions needs to be recorded by the camera movements rather than straight cuts, Renoir's style of camera movement and depth of field intensifies audience's sense of relations within groups. It is true that certain rhythms and relationships are best served by the straight cuts or successive separate shots, but a track or pan can enhance audience's awareness of the environment surrounding the characters. The integrity and continuity of certain actions in the film put the slowness of editing in converse to the rapidity of the actions. On the other hand, the great number of shots in this film reminds us that straight cut, for Renoir, is still an appropriate device to create a film, and his choices to create artistic situations from mement to moment are variably shifting from using of camera movements to editing, as Durgnat reminds us, " A track or pan from A to B, rather than a cut from the first frame of A to the last frame of B, may be slower, less bold, and involve more background distraction, but it may also enhance our awareness not only of the relationship between A and B, but of the possibility of gradually shifting relationships
between two within an external environment" (Durgnat,193).

Renoir looks on the film as a comedy whose hidden meanings can hardly be praised by the extreme left. Presumably, Renoir has offered French Public a film in which he seems to be attacking the superiority of French high society and to foreshadow Hitler's war against France. The press reviews about the film are even friendly, but the film is commercial disaster: " Either way, the film's receipts were everywhere to dismal and the alarmed overseas distributors were able to renounce their contracts, and La nouvelle Edition Francaise was bankrupt even before the film had had a chance to reach its " court of appeal", the international arthouse market" (Dugnat 190-191). In 1946, however, a French exhibitor discovered a print of 85-minute version. From 1946 on, La Regle du Jeu went the rounds in three different versions, of 90, 85 and 80 minutes. The foreign critics immediately assigned the film to a genre established by Stroheim: "Moralistic realism about highlife decadence appropriate to the demoralization of France. Renoir's subtitle described it as une fantasie dramatique, which surely implies something lighter-hearted than Storheim, but no one took any notice of so unfamiliar a category" (Durgnat, 192).

Before La Regle du Jeu Renoir's films convey a sense of hope and fragility, but after La Regle du Jeu the hope for progressive change is lost. Renoir's critique of whole society suggests that the Chateau's closed spaces a s a cage for the characters opposes to the vitality of nature and the freedom that Andre Jurieux's character(Roland Toutain) represents. Perhaps the ruthless and the ironic massacres of the rabbits in the nature are again another evidence to prove that the Chateau's microcosom embodies a self-assured and destructively frivolous society without having political future and understanding external forces. The contrast between Christine and Lisette (Paulette Dubost), Marquis and Andre  in which the differences between their social status were supposed to draw Renoir's film into focus on social disintegration of two different classes suggests that Christine, Lisette, Marquis and Andre all can be places into the same pessimistic and devastated landscape of human efforts that likes enthusiastically to change the social and political rules, but without having enough strength to do that. Christine has lack of self-awareness, and Lisette is frivolous. The Marquis is perhaps obsessed with his aristocratic mannerism and self-assurance, and Andre denies the crowd the image of public heroism they had sought and, finally, his anarchistic and self destructive behavior bring his accidental death into the plot, as Durgnat mentions in his book: One might argue that although the shooting is accidental it represents an unconscious collective resolution by a society which fears Jurieu's vitality" (Durgnat, 199).

Not surprisingly, Renoir states that there is not one character in La Regle du Jeu who's worth the bother of saving. The logic of the plot seems to suggest that in La Regle du Jeu no one and everyone are to blame, as Durgnat states, " In general, the hypocrisy require of an individual by society is less dangerous than self deception...Effective response to social situations depends on a certain balance between spontaneity, calculation and hypocrisy" (Durgnat, 200). In fact, all theatricality that is in balance with depth of field and camera's look to the events in the film emphasizes in people's struggle to survive in the society in which one needs to wear masks on order to be accepted and respected by the numbers of the community. The architecture of the mise-en scene in The Marquis' house and Chateau in which each room represents a platform and a stage for a new theatrical play are designed to offer the audience the rule of the social game which is hypocrisy. Only through depth of field, slow editing and mobility of camera movements, Renoir has enough strength to manifest his political declaration in defending of pacifist Communist left against ruling class of society. Beyond all the questions, it is by the destruction of love that society are found wanting. Renoir's final humanistic stance against the rules of the decadent society is truly expressed by the film.

Bazin, Andre. Jean Renoir New York; Simon & Schuster, 1973.

Braudy, Leo. Jean Renoir: The World of His Films New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Durgnat, Raymond. Jean Renoir Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

O'Shaughnessy, Martin. Jean Renoir U.K. Manchester university Press, 2000.

Renoir, Jean. Le Point Journal, 1938.

Sesonske, Alexander. Jean Renoir: the French Films, 1924-1939 Massachuset: Harvard university Press, 1980.




By: Morad Sadeghi