Rules of the Game

Directed by Jean Renoir

France • 1939 • 106 mins. • In French

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Although it was met with diverse responses when it was released, few films have earned such universal critical acclaim as Renoir’s masterpiece. The “game” is life: Renoir and cinematographer Henri Cartier-Bresson paint a broad canvas, taking as their subject the foibles of bourgeois French society. At a weekend hunting party on the eve of World War II, amorous escapades abound among the aristocratic guests and the servants in a Gallic “Upstairs, Downstairs.” The refusal of one guest to play by society’s rules sparks a chain of events that ends in tragedy, providing, in Renoir’s words, a “dramatic fantasy” of a “a rich, complex society. . . dancing on a volcano.”