Jean Renoir | La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) / 1939

playing at love: a world without sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Renoir and Carl Koch (screenwriters), Jean Renoir (director) La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) / 1939

 

Over the years since its first and evidently disastrous showing in France in 1939, Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) has received extensive commentary, particularly concerning its masterful mix of genres—farcical comedy, soap opera, drama, love story, political documentation and social satire—which function together not as pastiche as in many postmodern works, but as a shifting, improvisational entity that allows very few moments of viewer disinterest. The farcical elements of this fable—the various affairs between the wealthy La Chesnayes, wife Christine (Nora Gregor) and husband Robert (Marcel Dalio), the former of whom has had a recent dalliance with the heroic aviator André Jurieu (Roland Toutain) and the latter of whom is trying to end his long time affair with Geneviève de Marras (Mila Parély)—serve as ridiculous counterpoint to various other enamored actions of servants and guests at Christine and Robert’s weekend chateau-party for their friends—and enemies. As in the Beaumarchais, Marivaux, Musset and Molière comedies which inspired Renoir’s script, the serving-class characters parallel the bedroom antics of their masters—although in this work no one seems to be able to make love in a bedroom but must find various public rooms, nooks, and corners of the chateau to carry on their affairs.

    That includes at least one obvious gay figure (Géo Forster, described in the cast listing is described as the effeminate guest) who appears to change bedrooms as everyone pretends to settle for the night in the Chesnayes’ country house, Colinière, all the guests not quite ready to sleep as they dart into each other’s quarters, and behave a bit like bad children on a visit to sleep-in with friends. The gay boy hits the bottom of another fellow guest with a pillow as if attempting to encourage some sort of sexual recognition, even if most the men around him are certified sexual predators of the female species.

    But there are also other figures who, even if seemingly heterosexually interested, clearly lean toward same sex identification or, at least, don’t really have the interest in women or men that they pretend.

    Octave, a life-long friend of Christine’s who studied conducting under the mentorship of her famous Austrian father, flirts with all the women, and even imagines himself in love with Christine whom he looks after almost as a replacement father, describes himself openly as “not the marrying kind,” even if late in the plot he imagines eloping with his mentee. The character, performed by the film’s director Jean Renoir, is a clumsy bear of a man—he even appears dressed in a bear suit from which he cannot escape with the help of others in a series of playlets performed at the estate for the guests. He is also a good friend of the male hero of the story, Jurieux—the aviator who has flown across the ocean single-handed in the tradition of the American Charles Lindberg simply to impress his would-be lover Christine—who, despite his own hanger on designation insists that Jurieux be invited to the country party, despite the fact that it might present itself as a scandal, sharing a room with his male friend.

     Like the actor’s real-life role, Octave does flawlessly determine many of the actions and fates of the film’s central figures, but can find no real place for himself in this wealthy, rather moronic society, including any sexual role.

      Christine’s personal maid, Lisette (Paulette Dubost) is married to the estate’s gamekeeper, Edouard Schumacher (Gaston Modot), whose German sounding name, is in fact the true danger in this film set just a few months before the real German onslaught on France in 1939. She also engages in flirtatious dalliances with Octave and, more importantly, with the newly hired poacher, would-be house servant, Marceau (Julien Carette), who arouses the true jealousy of Schumacher who spends a great deal of the later film chasing him around the estate’s magisterial rooms with a loaded gun. Yet she is entirely devoted to her mistress, with an almost lesbian intensity that might make even an old dyke like Mrs. Danvers envious. She has utterly no intention of rejoining her husband in Colinière and environs, far preferring Christine’s Paris mansion. She might like the meaningless attentions of someone like Marceau, but has no time for real sex and, particularly, has no desire to be a traditional wife bearing children.

      And finally, even the master of the house, Robert, Marquis de la Chesnaye, might be described as rather effeminate, a man who despite his “love” of his trophy Austrian wife, and the supposed lover of Geneviève de Marras, is far more interested in his complex musical mechanical toys which he collects, representations of the figures of the world he might wish to embrace. Actually, he can no longer bear his mistress de Marras and meekly attempts to get rid of her, but is not man enough to stand up to her determination to tell Christine about their affair if he leaves her. We cannot imagine the two actually sharing anything but semi-affectionate kisses, and Robert clearly lives apart from his wife, having no sexual involvement with her whatsoever.

    Indeed, almost all the figures are ineffectual heterosexuals and pretend lovers, except the truly passionate Christine and our stock-boy hero Jurieux who is also so structured into the “rules of the game” that he could never run away with the woman he loves without properly explaining the situation to her husband first.

      All is show with the so-called naughty couples of this film, who lie and cheat with their spouses, their so-called sexual partners, and even with themselves.

     Even in their pretend show of being woodland hunters, they have a host of servants to beat the pheasants and rabbits out of the wood and into close range so they can pretend to be game hunters, and the brutally frank documentation of a shooting party’s indiscriminate massacre of every pheasant, rabbit, and quail that can be scared out of the woods by tree-pounding servants into easy killing-range—Renoir reveals through images alone the stupidity and violence at heart of this French society of wealth. Their every action is pretense built on wit and skill they don’t truly possess.

    Part of the great joy of this cinematic masterpiece is the insanity of these figures and others as they rush about the chateau, camera zooming after them, in chase of one another, lover running after lover, husbands in chase of wives and suitors both.

     Renoir, however, has deeper issues up his sleeve, so to speak. Particularly through his presentation of the always ready-to-be-bored party guests and their meaningless activities—from the silly amateur theatrical presentations of brief musical renditions of Tyrolian operettas (including a singing bear, Octave, who later can find no one to help him out of his costume), a macabre skeleton dance.

    The servants, meanwhile, give us glimpses of the antisemitism behind their culture.

    As critic Richard Brody observes in his The New Yorker review:

 

The Rules of the Game doesn’t mention any political figures, but it alludes to the division underlying the Occupation and its depravities: antisemitism.

     Robert is a marquis, inheritor of an ancient title of nobility, who nonetheless has German Jewish ancestry, something that attracts the attention of other characters. His own chauffeur haughtily refers to him as a métèque, a derogatory term for an immigrant, and his chef, noting that the subject of discussion is, specifically, Jews, praises the Marquis’s culinary refinement, says that he’s a gentleman “even though he’s a métèque.” What’s more, Renoir emphasizes Robert’s identity by casting the suave and ebullient Marcel Dalio, born in Paris as Israel Mosche Blauschild. (He was soon to win fame in Hollywood as the croupier in “Casablanca.”) The very antisemitism that Renoir underscores with the dialogue and the casting was partly responsible for the film’s commercial failure: right-wing viewers, aware of Renoir’s left-wing politics, came out to boo when Dalio was onscreen, and rightist critics sniped at the character, too. Meanwhile, the plot-pivoting rage of Schumacher—whose name Christine pronounces as if it were German—suggests a barbed allusion to the militaristic wolf at France’s door.”

 

      As Europe stood at cliff’s edge, Le Règle du jeu demonstrated all too well, evidently, why France would be unable to defeat the German armies. The film was not only badly received, but caused an uproar upon its premiere, one theater patron even lighting a newspaper afire in hopes of burning the movie house to the ground. Other theaters planning to show the film were threatened and, after having been re-cut several times, the movie was ultimately banned on the grounds that it was bad for the morale of the country. It is a near-miracle that most of the lost footage was eventually recovered and the film rediscovered in the Venice Film Festival of 1959. The movie I watched today, again for perhaps the 10th time, was the 1959 version that reinstated nearly all of Renoir’s original enforced cuts.

     A great many critics, in fact, have seemed to suggest that the film’s unstated predictions foretold a kind passivity on the part of the French haute bourgeoisie that ultimately allowed some French citizens to readily accept the Vichy government. Octave’s remark early in the film has been quoted extensively: “You know, in this world there’s one thing that is terrible: that everyone has his reasons.”

     Even earlier in the film, one of Renoir’s figures puts it quite bluntly, asking the audience outright, “What’s natural these days?”

     Once again what was thought to be natural among the wealthy class was homosexual behavior, not all greeted in Renoir’s work with an acceptance of what truly mattered. The elite, it is quite clear, even from Renoir’s generally humanistic perspective, were a neutered, asexual folk.

     Renoir’s work is significant because it brings these issues into focus, and although the director has no easy answers to his questions of moral consequence, the ultimate result of the ridiculous follies of the chateau’s inhabitants—the shooting death of the “hero” aviator André says everything: meaningless violence will ultimately be accepted quite readily by this society.

      Even if I cannot readily agree with these assessments of the film, Renoir’s work is so beautifully textured and complex in its structure that the movie moves in many directions simultaneously. I am interested, however, in another perhaps less political issue—although an ultimately even more troubling issue concerning the “polis”—a concern embedded in Renoir’s title, “the rules of the game.”

     We must recall that the theatrical performances, shooting parties and sexual chases I’ve already recounted are just a few of the “games” these people undertake. These people are, as Robert Altman has suggested in his version of such a “country weekend,” Gosford Park, an absolutely bored folk, a group of individuals with a great deal of money but, who without imagination, are desperate for further entertainments. The film begins, as I have already suggested, with just such a “game,” André has matched the record for long-range flying of Charles Lindbergh, a feat accomplished not because of his love of flying but in order to impress Christine. When she does not show up for his landing, he sulks, refusing to speak to the waiting radio audience; in short, as Octave describes it, he behaves as a spoiled child.

    The minute the guests begin to arrive at the La Chesnaye’s chateau, they begin talking of games: bridge, ping-pong and belote. Robert, the master of the house, is a collector of mechanical toys and other such gadgets, and the highlight of the theatrical productions is his presentation of his newest—and largest—acquisition to date: a room-size musical clock that features various doll-like figures performing instruments. Some of the most ridiculous moments in the movie, moreover, portray the nap and bedtime rituals of this group of supposed adults as they gather in the hallways to promenade back and forth, kissing each other goodnight, the males roughhousing like teenagers armed with pillows and other props. There is something almost painful in Renoir’s insistence upon our witnessing these child-like antics.

     To repeat, the most awful of the “entertainments” enjoyed by this group, however, are far more aggressive. The favorite game at Colinière is obviously gossip, a game that can be won only by the party being gossiped about admitting (or partially admitting) the facts. The camera almost drools over the various guests’ and servants’ salacious comments on the relationship between Madame La Chesnaye and André Jurieu until Christine blithely admits that the two have seen a great deal of each other and he has undertaken his voyage on her account. Later, upon accidentally spying her husband embracing Geneviève (an embrace, ironically, he attempts to deny her), Christine readily purports to have known of the affair, even convincing Geneviève of her knowledge and acceptance with an offer of open friendship. Even though she is an “outsider”—an Austrian and all that might suggest on the eve of World War II—she recognizes that the “rules” of this French game require that she not lose face.

    Yet, unlike most of the other figures in this game-playing universe, she is impetuous, desirous of breaking the “rules” by taking up with almost anyone who will help. The actress playing this part may be, as the late film-critic Gerald Mast described her, “as haunting and bewitching as a plaster giraffe,” but in her very ungainliness she stands apart from the others. After a brief tryst with M. de Saint-Aubin, she admits her love to André, suggesting that he and she simply run off. This “hero,” as I’ve already noted, must play the game properly, first accosting her husband to tell him of their intent to run off, and perhaps engaging him in a duel or at least suffering his outrage. Their “duel” of fisticuffs ends in Robert’s friendly warning that without sufficient money André can never hope to make Christine happy. And afterwards, they unexpectedly bond as two males who cannot quite fulfill Christine’s desires.

     Admitting her disappointment with her earthbound “hero,” Christine confides in her childhood friend, Octave, who also has secretly loved her all these years. After a long discussion, he agrees to take her away, but Lisette convinces him that, with no source of money whatsoever, he also would not be a good match. He hands over his coat to André who rushes to his waiting heroine and to his destiny, death at the hands the jealous gamekeeper, Schumacher, convinced that the woman waiting in the greenhouse is his wife Lisette. Meanwhile, even the testosterone-driven Schumacher has also bonded with another disappointed heterosexual of his class, Marceau.

     If we have some difficulty caring about the demise of the blandly dutiful André, we still recognize that his death signifies there is no escape from the confines of the highly-structured game-playing society. For in such a context, no other reality is possible. Robert covers up the murder with a simple lie, which Le Général salutes as evidence of his “class.” As Octave tells Christine: “Everyone lies: pharmaceutical fliers, the government, the radios, the movies, newspapers.”

    As the commentator who writes under the moniker Dragonknight on Letterboxd observes: “The Rules of the Game looks incredibly fresh as if it was made yesterday and about the world we’re living in and not the doomed Europe of 30s. There are some shocking and hair-raising similarities between what Renoir portrays in his film and what is happening in our time. We’re not on the verge of another madness, are we?”

    All their games, indeed, are based on falsehoods. In such a world, no one dares to ask the obvious questions: Are hunters to whom their prey is forced into gunsight really hunters? Are these hideously amateur performances really worthy of such delirious applause? Are any of these individuals really attractive enough to warrant such amorous attentions? Is a weekend in the country truly an enjoyable event? Most importantly we realize that in a world so caught up with meaningless affairs of the heart, there is utterly no time for actual sex.

     The parallel structures of master and servant, accordingly, make it quite clear that the class differences are not at the heart of this woeful tale of pre-World War II France. Indeed, the puppet-like “masters” must submit to the “realities” they have created every bit as much as the man downstairs shining their shoes.

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2006; revised May 28, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).