The Rules of the Game

Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) opened in Paris in July 1939, was withdrawn within weeks after disastrous reviews and audience riots, was re-cut by the studio, then largely lost when the original negative was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1942. The film was painstakingly reconstructed from surviving prints in 1956. It now sits permanently at the highest tier of the Sight & Sound poll, number 13 in the 2022 critics' chart, having topped it in 1962.

A weekend hunting party at the country estate of the Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) gathers the French upper-middle class and aristocracy on the eve of war: the celebrated aviator André Jurieux (Roland Toutain) hopelessly in love with the Marquis's wife Christine (Nora Gregor), the gamekeeper Schumacher whose marriage to a chambermaid is breaking down, the poacher Marceau, and the Marquis's confidant Octave (played by Renoir himself). Across forty-eight hours of comedies of manners and clandestine pursuits, the social order whose rules everyone follows but no one believes in collapses into a single act of accidental violence.

The famous chasse-à-courre hunting sequence (with rabbits and pheasants dispatched in a sustained six-minute shooting party) is one of the great political-cinematic provocations of pre-war Europe. Renoir denied the film was a critique of the bourgeoisie and insisted only that it was a comedy; both readings have been argued ever since.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that proved comedy could be the most serious of all forms, and the foundational text of the French art-cinema tradition. Eighty years on, it has not aged at all.