David Thomson's Top Ten Films: 'La Rÿgle du Jeu'

Real light, real places and the dangers of falling in love

La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) was a disaster when it opened in July 1939 ­ so never rely on early success. Jean Renoir felt he had made a war film without hostilities (not that gunfire doesn't play its part). He wanted to show a social structure cracking open, but he fashioned his story so that the viewer could hardly cry for laughing. That strain was too great. On the brink of real war, Parisians were uneasy. They decided that the film must be confused.

As for Renoir, he was so low he felt compelled to give up either France or the cinema.

Jean was the son of the painter, Pierre-Auguste. He was also one of his father's favourite subjects, accustomed to the alchemy in which a real life (his) could be turned into art (belonging to an audience). He grew up aware of being seen, watched, but without being intimidated. That awareness was the soil in which a new art, film, could bloom. So La Règle du Jeu comes out of ways of seeing and feeling established by Impressionism, Flaubert and de Maupassant: everyday, familial, social, intimate, yet as anecdotal as natural theatre.

In the 1930s, Jean Renoir steadily enlarged the capacity of film to observe real light, real places, real human interaction. It was a style of deep perspectives, of indoors wedded to outdoors, of movement (in players and camera). It was fluent, authentic and it was as if the camera were writing with light and human behaviour. (You can see it in Toni, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, Une Partie de Campagne, La Marseillaise and La Grande Illusion.) La Règle du Jeu is the culmination of that lively experiment, and it is like the best realist traditions in literature or theatre transposed to film. It makes enormous demands on our attention ­ to keep up with everything that is being shown, or can be glimpsed.

The narrative structure is a country house party, seen at the levels of aristocrats and servants, with love, or attraction, as a kind of infectious disease that attends the meeting of skins and desires. It is a film about falling in love, in which the fall feels rapturous but sickening.

It is about the dangers and the damage in that most irrepressible of urges.

That's one reason, at least, why it is so hard to say whether the film is a comedy or a tragedy.

Let's take the hard way out of that one: let's say it is both ­ that richness still makes audiences uneasy. It is still the biting test in modernism. (Modern art is not "difficult" because of techniques, but because of its challenging attitudes.) And La Règle du Jeu might have been made yesterday ­ if only we were blessed now with the genius of 1939 (or was it the need?).

We need something else, just as challenging, with this film, and it is vital to Renoir, and to what happened to him after 1939. It is the ability to regard life as theatre, as story, as material for art. What does that mean? That these adorable creatures, so pained and so paining from moment to moment, all have their reasons for doing what they do. People always have their justifications, and sooner or later that earnestness can lift desire over the bounds of ethics or decency. So we behave badly. Which is damaging, lamentable ­ and passing. In other words, don't waste time with blame, with moralising: the cinema is an art and a medium that is better at showing than in passing judgement; and the human species is defined by its ability to survive mistake.

But that flexibility needs a principle: such as life is theatre.

In the Thirties, Renoir made human tragedies (though they often had an ironic or optimistic edge). After the war, and after awkward yet vital years in Hollywood, Renoir made films that are serene in the face of tragedy, loss and human error ­ The River, French Cancan, The Golden Coach, Elena et les Hommes.

We can see now how La Règle du Jeu was the first of that second era, as well as the last of the first. So it is astonishing history.

You have to see it, and move with the mounting misrule of the party, calmed only by disaster. There is also Renoir himself, in front of the camera as well as behind it, jollying his friends ­ the actors ­ along, until the story's stain reaches him. And there is Dalio: the master of the house, a great actor, Jewish, forced to flee Paris very soon ­ and the croupier at Rick's place in Casablanca. This is a story of that kind of insouciant survival, as well as ghastly loss ­ of how life is a vagrant cork bobbing on the flow of an eternal river.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk