The Rules of the Game · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Marcel Dalio's Marquis stands before his newest mechanical organ, a gilded contraption crowded with little automated figures, and waits for the applause. The pride on his face keeps sliding toward something like shame. He has bought a machine that performs joy on command, and for a second he is more exposed than any of his guests, because you can see that he knows the gap between the music and the man cranking it into being. Renoir hands you the whole film in that look. Everyone at La Colinière is a beautifully tooled instrument running its assigned part, and the question the picture asks, lightly at first and then with no lightness left, is what happens when one of the figures tries to step out of the works.

Deleuze has a name for a world built like this. He calls it the crystal-image: a present and its own reflection grown so close that you can no longer separate them, life and the performance of life folded into one bright sealed object. The château is precisely such a crystal. Upstairs the masters carry on affairs under the code of discretion; downstairs the servants carry on the same affairs under the same code, and the two registers mirror one another so exactly that you lose track of which is the copy. Christine's poise, Lisette's jealousy, the husband's mistress, the maid's gamekeeper husband: each gesture above has its twin below, and the whole house glitters with this doubling.

What makes the crystal Renoir's, and not someone else's, is the kind of crystal it is. Deleuze sorts them by how they behave, and Renoir is his chosen example of the one that is cracked. Somewhere in the perfect mirrored order there is always a flaw, a fissure, a line running off toward the outside, and through it someone can break role and walk back toward life. That is the cracked crystal: the totality is sealed, but never quite. Octave, the rumpled go-between who fails at everything including love, is the crack made flesh, and when the poacher Marceau finally drifts off into the dark at the end, you are watching a man slip out of the machinery the others die inside.

Before it cracks, though, the crystal performs. Almost everything these people do is what Deleuze, thinking about bodies in cinema, calls the gest: a posture or attitude that exposes a social relation instead of acting on it. The bowing, the discretion, the costumes, the skeleton routine danced to Saint-Saëns while the orchestrion blares are not behavior so much as roles held up for inspection. "Everyone has their reasons," the film famously insists, which is another way of saying everyone is reciting a part they did not write. The rules of the title are the choreography, and the tragedy is simply the choreography breaking down.

It breaks down twice. First in the Sologne, where the photography drops its drawing-room manners and turns cold and documentary, and Marguerite Renoir's cutting goes percussive, clipped, building through the slaughter of rabbits and pheasants. The crystal shows what it is made of: killing rendered tidy and rhythmic by people who call it sport. Then at the party, the order spins faster and faster, a gun chase through the rooms with the mechanical music still grinding, until the house flings off a corpse. This is the crystal in its other motion, the aristocratic world rotting from inside its own elegance, a danse macabre that means it.

Around all of this presses something the frame can never show. The film opens onto a whole it cannot contain: the war coming in 1939, unlocatable, off-screen in the absolute sense, leaning on the glass. Renoir keeps the camera moving the entire time, Bachelet's deep focus holding a flirtation in the foreground and a quarrel at the back in the same legible breath, tracking down corridors and through doorways so that masters and servants pass through one continuous space. The mobile shot here is not decoration. It is the argument: this is a single social field, and it is all going down together.

This is where film theory caught up with Renoir. André Bazin built much of his case for cinematic realism on exactly this depth of field and this unbroken take, which leave the viewer's eye free to choose where to look rather than being marched through a scene by montage. Renoir gets there two years before Citizen Kane and in a warmer key. What he proved is large. A film could hold an entire class in one moving frame and let that frame quietly fracture, without ever cutting the society into separate, manageable pieces.

He did not invent this alone. He worshipped Stroheim, and the predatory aristocrat-as-counterfeit of Foolish Wives, the unsentimental deep-staged cruelty of Greed, are the model he refits for his château parasites. Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise gave him the master-servant roundelay of disguised desire, which he darkens. His own films rehearsed the rest: the near-circular courtyard pan of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, the camera gliding across class in La Grande Illusion, the deep-focus fatalism of La Bête humaine. And what he seeded runs straight to Altman's overlapping ensembles and to every later film that tries to keep a whole society alive inside one frame.

Booed off the screen in 1939, hacked down by its own panicked director, banned, then literally bombed out of existence before being pieced back together in 1959, the film now sits near the summit of the medium. Watch it again and watch the edges. The affair nobody told you to follow, happening in soft focus behind the one you were given, is the real subject. Renoir's gift is that he lets you choose, and then makes you responsible for what you chose to see.