La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939) (review)

At a recent international film conference a young European participant expressed to me his great perplexity regarding the canonical status of La Règle du jeu. How could it possibly rank second only to Citizen Kane in the history of cinema? At that time, had I read Keith Reader’s new work, I would certainly have referred him to this elegant, concise, and highly informative study. Reader not only shows why this is ‘the Everest of French cinema’ (p. 11), but does so in a manner that contextualizes the film for a current generation of serious students of Renoir. His approach is both methodical and engaging. He provides a short biography focused on Renoir’s cinematic output, an overview of literary and theatrical pre-texts, cinematic intertexts, the historical context of French 1930s politics and cinema, and a sequence-by-sequence analysis that makes up the bulk of the volume. He also addresses the film’s reception and its indelible mark on later directors following its 1959 re-release at the advent of the New Wave, and offers a concise yet thorough analysis of the major critical approaches to the film since its re-release. The final chapter takes up its current influence as a vital intertext for more recent films. What makes Reader’s work so rich for students and scholars alike is both the wealth of detail and his impressive command of the subject in terms of the historical moment and the cultural and artistic context of 1930s France, the film’s many resonances within Renoir’s French œuvre, and theoretical stances of its critical reception from 1939 to the present. His sequence analyses are masterfully interwoven with major critical assessments that he both engages and extends. For example, Deleuze’s ‘cracked crystal’ metaphor of the film’s multiple mirrorings is elaborated to shed greater light on La Règle’s subversive thrust. Rich cultural, aesthetic, and critical detail informs the readings of each major sequence. Clothing habits, shoeshining protocol, hunting practices, prison terms for duels, origins of proverbs and linguistic usage all fit neatly into this small volume, along with such fraught questions as the theatrical versus cinematic, and realism versus performance in Renoir’s work. Reader’s triage of the major theoretical approaches to the film over time — auteurist, ideological, historical, industrial, etc. — informatively situates them within a shifting historical framework and demonstrates that no matter what the critical bent, the film ‘exemplifies the inseparability of the social and the aesthetic’ (p. 102). Reader’s closing analyses of more contemporary films that bear strong traces of La Règle (principally Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amérique and Altman’s Gosford Park) are intriguing in both the connections he proposes and the open-endedness of his perspective. Like the mirrors in La Règle, the potential reflections and reverberations of Renoir’s chef-d’œuvre prove infinite. Reader’s project to bring this film to a new generation of students is as laudable as it is effective. He has shown with remarkable concision and erudition that La Règle is ‘a film (the film?) of its time and one for all time’ (p. 115).