Oops! Looks like we're having trouble connecting to our server.
Refresh your browser window to try again.
About this product
Product Information
A drama set in a country house which revolves around 9 characters who represent French middle class society. French dialogue with subtitles.
Product Identifiers
ProducerClaude Renoir
EAN5035673005835
eBay Product ID (ePID)3960936
Product Key Features
ActorMila Parely, Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Jean Renoir, Roland Toutain, Pierre Magnier, Paulette Dubost
Film/TV TitleLa Regle Du Jeu
DirectorJean Renoir
LanguageFrench
Subtitle LanguageEnglish
Run Time110 Mins
Aspect Ratio1.33 Full Screen
Release Year2003
FormatDVD
FeaturesDirectors Biography\Documentary on the Making of the Film, Black & White, With Subtitles
GenreDrama, General
Additional Product Features
Number of Discs1
CertificatePG
Country/Region of ManufactureFrance
Additional InformationWidely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's masterpiece THE RULES OF THE GAME is a devastating satire of the pre-WWII French aristocracy. Starring Marcel Dalio as wealthy landowner Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye, it charts the shifting relationships among the guests at a weekend hunting party on his vast estate. The guest list includes Robert's mistress Genevieve (Mila Parely), from whom he's trying to part, and Andre Jurieu (Roland Toutain), a famed aviator who is in love with Robert's wife, Christine (Nora Gregor). As they begin a dizzy dance of escape and pursuit, their games are observed and echoed by the servants below the stairs. The gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot) is trying to keep the poacher, Marceau (Julien Carette), from poaching on his pretty wife, Lisette (Paulette Dubost), unaware that his boss also has his eye on her. The passionate Jurieu, the only guest incapable of the appropriate hypocrisy, finds Christine in an embrace with a random lover (Pierre Nay), and the startled woman decides to leave Robert and go away with the aviator. Renoir's subtle deployment of long tracking shots in multiplanar deep focus reveals the relations of both groups and individuals as he dismantles the rituals of hypocrisy that make this society run smoothly.
I was curious to see this as it features in lists of top 10 best films of all time, and it’s directed and acted in by the painter Renoir’s son Jean. It has elements of the theatre about it but Renoir also uses the outdoors and countryside to great effect. It could be a morality tale for our times, about enormously rich and privileged people who live unprincipled and selfish lives. There is a very brutal hunting scene in which, according to the notes, hundreds of animals were killed. Renoir himself was so upset by it he had to leave. Which seems odd since he had ordered it in the first place.