063 - The Rules of the Game, 1939, France. Dir. Jean Renoir.

Saturday, March 5, 2017

063 - The Rules of the Game, 1939, France. Dir. Jean Renoir.

We are dancing on a volcano.

So says Renoir himself.

It is 1939.  France is in chaos.  The citizens know that war is imminent.  Germany is on the march.  Paris will collapse.  The world as we know it will disappear.

So Renoir makes a frivolous film, a farce set in the countryside, a comedy of manners in a French chateau.  Something to take our minds off current events.  Light entertainment.

Or does he?

Dudley Andrew called The Rules of the Game the most complex social criticism ever enacted on the screen.

Some view it as the great masterpiece of world cinema.

It has been called the film of films.

Renoir fills the screen with a myriad of characters, specifically drawn, in complicated relationships, each with his own approach to love, each one in love, some of them changing, and each with his own objective.  The upper class is mirrored by the working class, and multiple plots take place and overlap one another.

All in one night.

It is like A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Something is going on with the moon.  Something is in the air.  Nothing is as it should be.  Everyone is chasing the wrong person.

Someone is going to die.

The Rules of the Game contains many long takes, with a moving camera, with the frame in deep focus.

Thirty-something years before the Steadicam was invented.

Orson Welles revolutionized cinema when he released Citizen Kane, the oft-voted greatest film of all time, with his use of deep focus.  That means every object in the frame is in focus at the same time, whether it is near, far, or in between.

Filmmakers today on the whole do not follow this standard.  The current trend is to focus on the foreground and leave the background out of focus.  Then "rack focus" to the background, leaving the foreground out of focus.  By doing that you isolate a part of the screen and tell the viewer what to look at.  With deep focus, however, you show everything and allow the viewer to decide what to look at, presenting the scene in the way that the human eye would see it and showing respect for the viewer's intelligence.

Deep focus is difficult to master and is a mark of outstanding cinematography.  When Orson Welles did it, it was revolutionary.

Jean Renoir did it two years before.

But he also did the opposite.

Sometimes a character enters the frame in crisp focus, then walks out of focus, and then walks back into focus.

Sometimes instead of long takes, we have highly edited sequences with many tiny takes.

The characters go on a game hunt.  Rabbits and pheasant.  The film sets up all the players, including the animals.  And then when it launches it cuts, cuts, cuts like the shower scene in Psycho.  A bombardment of camera angles.  A symphony orchestrated in the edit.

Then there is the party.  And the show at the party.  With Renoir there is always a show.

Have you seen Noises Off?

This is Noises Off on steroids.

Imagine the difficulty of filming inside a great house with multiple plots going on and everything in chaos.  Two people are fighting over here.  Two people are sneaking off to make love over there.  A group of people are gossiping in that room.  Some folks are singing and dancing in that one.  Someone chases someone else with a gun throughout all of it.  Whenever doors open, we see another story in the background.  We can see something happening on the floor and something else on the stairs at the same time.  The camera watches everything without cutting, and it glides from room to room on a dolly track while panning, tilting, and zooming, staying in focus and with all the actors staying in character and doing everything in perfect timing.

What is harder than that?

Having the director himself crawling around on camera wearing a bear suit.

The script is highly complex and mathematically precise, yet when you watch it, it seems just as plotless and chaotic as the action going on in the chateau.

Let us see if we can map out a few of the relationships.

Jackie loves André.  An unnamed character played by Roger Forster loves André.  André loves Christine.  Genevieve loves Robert.  Robert loves Christine in a different way from André.  Octave loves Christine in a third way.  Octave loves Lisette.  Schumacher loves Lisette.  Marceau loves Lisette.  Lisette loves Marceau.  Lisette loves Christine in a different way.  Christine loves Robert.  Then she loves St. Aubin.  Then she loves André.  Then she loves Octave.

André is the hopeless romantic.  Robert is the tolerant husband.  Octave is the childhood friend.  Schumacher is the jealous husband.  Marceau is the poacher-player.  Genevieve is the jilted lover.  Christine is the prized possession.  Lisette is the modern lover.

Genevieve and Christine vie for Robert and then come together against him.  André seeks a duel with St. Aubin and then fights him open-handedly.  André seeks a an audience with Robert and then gets it.  Octave intercedes for André.  Schumacher tries to kill Marceau and then teams up with him.

Something like that.

The rules of society are broken from the beginning of the film.  André, a middle-class man, an outsider, has crossed the Atlantic by plane and become a national hero.  He and Christine, an upper-class woman, have spent some time together beforehand and he has interpreted it as true and passionate love.  When he lands he is interviewed on national radio, and he declares this improper love for a married woman of noble station before a national audience.

Throughout the rest of the film the rules will be broken and mended, and the game will be played and lost.

Marcel Dalio, known as Dalio, plays the Marquis, Robert de la Chesnaye, in a stunning performance.  We just saw him in Grand Illusion (061, March 2) as Rosenthal, a soldier, a man of the earth, with a moustache, a manly haircut, a practical hat, clothes worn like burlap, a baritone voice, an ambling gait.  Today he is clean-shaven, his hair swept back with product, caked with make-up, dressed in white tie, gliding across the room, a tenor, with mannerisms, and an affect.  Is this the same man?

I went back and reviewed Grand Illusion again after watching The Rules of the Game.  I have seen both films multiple times.  But this time I wanted to compare Dalio's two characters.  Rosenthal and Chesnaye (a descendent of a Rosenthal).  They were specific, real people, complex, and very different.  Everything about them was different.  This is a mark of a great actor.

You may know Dalio, even if you think you do not.  He played Emil, the croupier, in Casablanca.  He was Callet in The Song of Bernadette.  He played Frenchy in To Have and Have Not.  Remember Humphrey Bogart calling him by name?  Hey, Frenchy!  He acted in The Snows of Kilimanjaro with Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, and the Baron St. Fontanel, with Audrey Hepburn and again with Humphrey Bogart, in Sabrina.  He was the ship's captain in Anything Goes and Zizi in The Sun Also Rises.  (That makes two Hemingway adaptations!)  He played Pierot in the great comedy Pillow Talk, and Father Cluzeot, opposite John Wayne, in John Ford's Donovan's Reef.  He reteamed with Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million, and he appeared in Mike Nichols' adaptation of Catch-22.

Dalio lived to be 83, and he had a career that spanned fifty years.  Here in The Rules of the Game, he holds the film together.  He is the ultimate rule-follower, and he follows the rules to the end.

Meanwhile, Jean Renoir himself plays Octave, who holds the characters together, the outsider allowed in the inner circle.  Somewhat like Max Detweiler in The Sound of Music, he is a freeloader, a parasite, without money, yet a friend to all and vital to their lives.

Throughout the night the game is played.

Who will win?  Who will lose?

Who will keep the rules?  Who will break them?

We are dancing on a volcano.

Come join the dance.