The film "Rules of the Game" (1939) French Blu-ray edition cover
In the 1930s, the European continent was in a precarious state. The appeasement of Britain and France and the fall of the Czech Republic did not stop hitler's ambitions from expanding, and Jean Renoir (1894-1979), who was deeply troubled by the clouds of war, witnessed the strange things happening around him and decided to do the opposite, making a "frivolous film" to express his inner pain.
"In the face of this hopeless world, the way to express our ideas should not be to talk about it, but to tell a frivolous story." Thus came the Rules of the Game La règle du jeu (1939), a film that, in the words of the famous American film historian Dudley Andrew, was "the most complex social critique film."
In 1917, Jean Renoir (left) poses with his father, the famous painter Pierre-Augustus Renoir
Jean Renoir was born on 15 September 1894 in Paris, France, to a famous family, the second son of the famous painter Pierre-Augustus Renoir.
His older brother Pierre was 9 years older than him, became a well-known film and stage actor, and worked with his younger brother on several screens.
Younger brother Claude is 7 years younger than him (he is also a producer of "Rules of the Game"), and the birth of his younger brother removes a major heart disease from Renoir Jr., and with this "successor", he does not have to sit every day to work as a painting model for his father.
Catherine Hecelyn
After their marriage, Jean Renoir and his wife, Catherine Hessling (1900-1979), a model, developed the habit of going to the cinema every day, especially Hollywood movies.
In 1923, russian director Ivan Moszyukin's "Hot Charcoal Fire" made him decide to abandon pottery and devote himself to the film industry.
Previously, Jean Renoir had tried to record his wife's beauty with photos and family movies, but he was not satisfied with this, and he hoped to make his wife a hollywood-level star through real movies.
Stills from the film The (1931), George françois Flamant (right) and Janie Marèse
At first, he only wanted to invest in this goal at his own expense, but he couldn't find a suitable script. So Jean Renoir wrote one himself, and named it Catherine after his wife.
It can be said that it is because of the existence of Catherine Heisling that we have this great director and those outstanding works.
However, in 1931, when Jean Renoir made his first sound film, La Chienne (1931), he agreed to the company's request to replace his wife who was the heroine, which eventually led to the dissolution of the marriage.
Stills from the film The Great Mirage (1937), Jean Gaben (left) and Dita Parlo
Fortunately, Jean Renoir's film inspiration did not disappear with the departure of his wife, but rather one masterpiece after another.
La Grande Illusion (1937) and La bête humaine (1938) became among the few works of his film career that received high praise that year.
The rare box office success also prompted him to invest with his brother Claude and three other friends to set up his own film company, the "New French Version".
Image of Mira Parrelli in the film The Rules of the Game (1939).
They plan to recruit other great directors and big-name stars like Jean Gabin to make two independent films a year.
The new company's first production was "The Rules of the Game", which was also the most expensive French film to produce that year.
During the filming, he overspended due to weather reasons, and Jean Renoir lamented that "fortunately it is his own company, and you don't have to worry about others checking your ledger".
Image of Marcel Dario in the film The Rules of the Game (1939).
The film tells the story of pilot Andrei Jurieu (Roland Toutain) who completes an amazing flight mission: he crosses the Atlantic Ocean in 23 hours.
Accomplished this, he wants to conquer the heart of an upper-class woman named Christina (Nora Gregor).
But the lady did not even go to Bourget airport to welcome him back. He very childishly expressed his despair over the radio.
From left: Images by Roland Tutan, Jean Renoir, Marcel Dalio, and Nora Gregor in the film The Rules of the Game (1939).
Jurieu wants to commit suicide by car, and his friend Octave (Jean Renoir), fearing tragedy, pleads with the de La Chasne family to send an invitation to Julieux to go hunting in LaClinière, their domain in Sologne.
During this time, Robert (Marcel Dalio) during his patrol of his own land, despite the strong opposition of the hunting caretaker Schumacher (Gaston Mordor Gaston Modot), hired a poacher named Marceau (Julien Carette) named Marceau (Julien Carette).
From left: Images by Richard Francoeur, Nora Gregor, and Serre Dalio in the film The Rules of the Game (1939).
During the hunt, Christina is surprised to discover that her husband and her friend Genavier de Marast (Mila Parély) are having an affair, and he is preparing to break up with his mistress.
Suddenly helpless, Christina resigned herself to Julieux and another courtship, Monsieur de Saint-Aubin.
At a masquerade party, everyone took off their masks. Julieux fights Saint-Aubin first and then Robert, while the hunter Schumacher chases Marceau through the crowd with a pistol as he discovers that the guy dares to seduce his wife, Lisette Dubost.
From left: Images of Julien Carette, Gaston Mordo, and Serre Dario in the film The Rules of the Game (1939).
Next, the storm was temporarily calmed. Julieux and Robert reconcile, and the two talk about Christina's future.
Marceau comforts Schumacher, who has been driven out of the castle, while Octave, who has been secretly in love with Christina for a long time, finally feels ripe to show her love and persuades her to elope with him.
However, Schumacher was stunned by the back-and-forth change of clothes, and at the instigation of Marceau, he shot and killed Julieux.
Stills from the film The Rules of the Game (1939), roland Tutan (left) and Nora Gregor
The guests rushed over, and before their puzzled eyes, Robert and Christina rushed back to la Clenière, the domain, for the sake of the whole body.
At the end of the film, Christine calmly returned to her room after saying a faint "Good night, gentlemen, see you tomorrow".
Jean Renoir called the film "a true portrayal of bourgeoisie in our time." This class naturally refers to the so-called "upper bourgeoisie", whose ignorance and weakness caused the chaos in Europe in 1939.
Stills from the movie The Rules of the Game (1939), from left: Jean Renoir, Roland Tutan, Nora Gregor
To show the ignorance of this class and of this era, he chose two classic French stage plays as his sources: Alfred de Mussée's Mariana of the Watery Poplars and Beaumarchais' The Wedding of Figaro.
The various characters are then grouped into opposing groups.
Originally formed, the four characters from Water were jealous husbands, loyal wives, desperate lovers, and friends who meddled in them.
Image of Serre Dario (left) and Mira Parrelli in the film The Rules of the Game (1939).
He then pairs and copies the four characters, thus forming two groups of husbands, wives, lovers, mistresses, and friends in the main parallel and opposing main character groups in the film, one group is the master living upstairs, and the other is the servant who lives downstairs.
"I've always wanted to make a film to show this complex and diverse society, where we're dancing on a volcano." Although there is no reference to war in the film, Jean Renoir sees it as a film about war.
Images of Roland Tutan (left) and Jean Renoir (right) in the film The Rules of the Game (1939).
The nine main characters in Rules of the Game all have emotional problems to solve, and because the film records the eve of the outbreak of the "crisis", we see their own performances.
Only one of them was sincere, and that was the pilot André Julieux, but he was reckless and launched a "happy play" and became the only tragic figure himself for not following the "rules of the game".
The film The Rules of the Game (1939) is a French DVD cover
The film also shows the contradictions within a dying class, who deceive each other and are inconsistent. The seemingly humorous dialogue is full of holes.
They talk, but they never really communicate, or they don't want to show their hearts at all. The principle of moderation does not create the expected harmony, despair is accompanied by loss, and the signs of the whole society convey a kind of panic that "the mountain rain is about to come and the wind is full of buildings".
For these "dancers" who danced in the crater, Jean Renoir had already thought of the right person when he wrote the script.
Stills from the film The Rules of the Game (1939), Nora Gregor (right) and Paulette Dubost
The role of André was intended to be played by Jean Gabin (1904-1976), who had collaborated many times, and Jean Renoir even changed the role from conductor to pilot in order to suit his temperament, but Jean Gabon had already taken over other films.
The role of the heroine Christine was originally intended to be Simone Simone Simone Simone (1910-2005), who had previously collaborated on "The Cloaked Beast", but unfortunately she was paid too much this time.
Set of the film The Rules of the Game (1939), Jean Renoir (right), Nora Gregor (second from right), cinematography Jean-Paul Alphen (third from right)
In search of a replacement, Jean Renoir went to a theater to investigate candidates for a play actor, only to find Nora Gregor (1901-1949) in the audience, who was also an actress, from Austria, and later married to the Austrian prince Stahimberg.
Nora Gregor's French is very unsatisfactory, but to Jean Renoir it sounds like "a wonderful little obstacle to separating the character from the pure French circle."
The role of Octave was played by himself, because "it would allow me to be more involved in the film myself."
Stills from the movie The Rules of the Game (1939), Nora Gregor
However, he is not the protagonist of this film, to be precise, "Rules of the Game" is a movie without a protagonist.
"It's a film that reflects a society, a group, and I want to portray an entire class."
The mansion in the countryside determines the social environment in which the film is located, and the two lines in the film concisely point out the moral code of the time: "The so-called love is only a mixture of the thoughts of two people on a whim, and the contact between the skin of two people." "The scariest thing in life is this: everyone has their own reasons."
Stills from the movie The Rules of the Game (1939).
In The Rules of the Game, the reason for this is really the same: I love him/her. And Jean Renoir's excellent "scene scheduling" has also become one of the highlights of the film.
While the film is meant to reflect a chaotic world, The Rules of the Game itself is clearly organized and precisely structured, like the mechanical toys that the Marquis in the film fascinates.
Unfortunately, the Parisian audience in 1939 did not accept this structure.
The image at the end of the movie The Rules of the Game (1939).
On the day of the premiere, the audience was in a state of rage in the cinema, all kinds of garbage were smashed on the screen, and some people lit newspapers and tried to burn the entire theater.
A week later, director Jean Renoir was forced to re-edit the film, and ten minutes of content were taken away, but the audience was still not satisfied.
Six weeks later, the French government declared "The Rules of the Game" a banned film, "we banned its release to avoid the director's slander and denigration of our country, traditions, and race."
Stills from the film The Rules of the Game (1939), Julian Callett (left) and Pollett Dubost
Jean Renoir was devastated and had to make a choice, either to abandon the film altogether or to leave France. It wasn't long before he was called into the army, and The Rules of the Game became the only work of the "New French Version" company.
A year later, in order to escape the Nazis, Jean Renoir came to Hollywood and began a new film career.
During World War II, British bombers blew up the warehouse where the original negatives of the film were stored, and for many years after the war, people could only see a fragmented version of the Game Rules that was more than half an hour shorter than the original version.
Stills from the film The Rules of the Game (1939), Marcel Dario (left) and Jean Renoir
In 1956, two technicians recovered 224 boxes of residual film from a ruin and began to repair and re-edit the film under the direction of Jean Renoir himself. The final version, according to him, is exactly the same as the original version, except for one inconsequential shot.
Even today, The Rules of the Game is a complicated movie. Which causes more harm than lying or telling the truth? Who is Christina's favorite? What is Jean Renoir's attitude toward the aristocrats in the film? None of these problems can be solved by watching them once or twice.
Stills from the movie The Rules of the Game (1939), Roland Tutan
Jean Renoir is considered by many critics to be one of the most important film directors in the history of world cinema. His films span different stages such as silent film and sound film, black and white film and color film, between realism and expressionism, traditional film and modern film, and do not belong to any one school.
François Truffaut (1932-1984) said: "The Rules of the Game is the supreme creed of fans, the king of cinema".
Image of Odette Talazac in the film The Rules of the Game (1939).
Alan Renai Alain Resnais (1922-2014) said: "Watching The Rules of the Game was the most shocking experience I've ever had in a movie theater, and the first time I saw it, I walked out of the theater and I had to sit down on the side of the road immediately, probably for 5 minutes. Then I got up and walked the streets of Paris for a few hours, and the feeling was that it had upended everything, and my original idea of the movie had been completely changed. When I watched it in the cinema, my emotional reaction was very intense. In fact, I thought that if this or that scene had been another shot or two, I would have cried or screamed or reacted to something else. ”
American director Robert Altman (1925-2006) put it more simply: "I learned the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game. In 2001, he paid tribute to the film with Goldford Manor (2001).
The Film The Rules of the Game (1939) American Standard Collection The Criterion Collection Blu-ray Edition Cover
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