Octave (Renoir), the aviator and Christine
Film Friday
The film I write on today is one that has the resonance of great literature. It is also a film that affirms our humanity in the face of fear. Since too often we let fear set us against one another, it is good to look at a work of art that reminds us to focus that we are all worthwhile individuals struggling to get along. We each of us have dreams that we fail to live up to and insecurities that hamstring us. Director Jean Renoir understands this about us.
Rules of the Game (La Regle du Jeu) came out at a fearful time and it paid a price for its unflinching honesty. The time was July of 1939 and France was only two months away from war with Germany, a war that would lead to its conquest and subjugation. The country was in an intense state of denial and Renoir called it out.
He called it out through, of all things, a comedy of manners. Rules of the Game is about a hunting party in the country hosted by a marquis. Everyone is in love with Christine, the wife of the marquis, including a daring young aviator reminiscent of Lindbergh who has flown the English channel at night; Christine’s childhood friend Octave (played by Renoir) who once had aspirations to be a great musician but who has become a hanger-on; and the marquis himself.
Christine, a pure soul, dreams of a life lived without lies. She thinks she has found it in her marriage to the marquis—and he, in turn, resolves to “be worthy of my wife”—but she then learns about his mistress. This sends her into free fall and she looks for a man who can live up to her ideals. At one point it seems to be the aviator, but she discovers that a hero in the air can have “feet of clay” when it comes to the earth. Then she thinks it will be Octave, but he loses his nerve—he fears that she will become disillusioned with him and bails out on their plan to run off together. The occasion calls for heroic action and none of the men is able to step up.
Although the film at times resembles comic melodrama, a sense of violence and doom pervades it. Some of the atmosphere is set up by an extended hunt containing scenes of violence that, for the time, were unprecedented. Although it is the privileged classes who are slaughtering scores of pheasants and rabbits, we have the sense that a fearful rage bubbles beneath the surface of society as a whole, threatening to erupt at any moment. A militaristic gamekeeper (he is from Alsace) directs the hunt, and one can very easily imagine him becoming a fascist in the years to come. In a case of mistaken identity, at the end of the film he shoots the aviator, and the partiers, shell-shocked, retreat into their mansion.
The film is now considered one of cinema’s most respected works. Every ten years since 1962, in the Sight and Sound poll, international film critics have voted Rules of the Game as either the second or third greatest film ever made. Yet when it first appeared, it was a spectacular failure.
People came to the theater prepared to see a masterpiece. That is how Renoir announced it and he was already revered, the son of the legendary painter and director of the very impressive Grande Illusion. Instead, audiences saw a film that baffled and scared them. Booing began early in some theaters and never stopped. It was a debacle of monumental proportions.
Everything went downhill after that. Renoir had sunk all of his own money and that of friends into the film and couldn’t afford to have a failure. (He also sold many of his father’s paintings to finance it.) He cut the scenes where audiences booed the loudest but that didn’t help. Then, when World War II began in September, the film was banned by the French military as a threat to French morale. When France was conquered, first the Vichy government and then the Germans also banned the film. Then the one complete copy of the film (before Renoir’s cuts) was destroyed by allied bombing. A fitting end, many thought.
Only that wasn’t the end. After the war film stock from Rules of the Game was discovered in a warehouse, and fans of Renoir started reconstructing the original film. Renoir was there for consultation and, in the end, all but 90 seconds of the original film were restored. When people saw the film in 1959, they felt they were in the presence of greatness.
In my opinion, the film failed in 1939 because it put its finger directly on a France’s deepest anxiety, a fear that its men would not be able to rise to the German challenge that everyone saw coming. There was a lot of militaristic bluster and many bombastic declarations of patriotism at the time but these covered over the insecurity, even the fatalism, of a country that was still in shock over the trauma of World War I. Renoir named the anxiety that no one wanted to acknowledge and as a result elicited a hysterical response.
As fellow filmmaker Marcel Carnet said when his own films were banned by the Vichy government, they blamed the barometer for the weather.
What makes the film great, in my opinion, is the way that is shows how (in the words of Octave) “everyone has his reasons.” One sympathizes with the marquis, the aviator, Octave, Christine, the mistress, even the gamekeeper. They are in the midst of a tragedy but no one is really to blame.
That’s why the film is so important for us today. In a time of intense polarization, we often let our fears drive us when instead we should be striving to see the humanity that each carries within him or her. As Renoir reveals, it takes heroism to do so, the heroism of everyday life. The challenge should spur us on, not discourage us.
One Comment
As a writer whose own work has not yet been as welcomed as I would like, I find this story SO inspiring! It’s particularly striking to me that Renoir had this failure after the spectacular success of the much-beloved (but to me, not quite as brilliant) “Grand Illusion.” In a similar way, F. Scott Fitzgerald had enormous popular and critical success with earlier works, but audiences and critics turned, almost viciously, on “The Great Gatsby,” which likewise said things about their society that they simply preferred not to hear. As the artist, you have to try to speak the truth as best you can, and to speak it in a way that it can be heard. But if people almost hysterically refuse to listen, what else can you do? I’m especially struck by Renoir’s own almost hysterical attempts to cut out the portions of the film that offended viewers–and how that still didn’t help. It’s never easy walking that line between solipsistic self-indulgent certainty that YOU are the genius and the problem is only with other people…and actually BEING the truth-teller whom others are rejection for the wrong reasons. Since in my opinion Renoir never made another movie that even came close to “Rules of the Game” (despite the many wonderful films he did make), I wonder what the apparent failure did to his artistic resolve and to his courage to continue…or if it was simply that the historical conditions of “Rules of the Game” (the Popular Front, the artistic climate of the time) were perfectly suited to his gifts, and he never again found himself in as fruitful a context. Or maybe you only have one or two monumental works in you, and “Illusion” and “Rules” were his…Anyway, all very inspiring and supportive at a time when I’m struggling with my own would-be masterwork, so thanks for retelling this story at a moment when I particularly needed to hear it!
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