La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) (1939), directed by Jean Renoir. Heights Theater, Thursday, June 5.

Renoir’s Rules of the Game is, by all critical accounts, one of the greatest films of all time. If you look at the Criterion DVD, inside the booklet there’s a number of pages of testimonials to this fact, of filmmakers gushing over its greatness. The story of the film’s release is at once heartbreaking and triumphant: how, in 1939, as the world was being swallowed by the Nazis, Renoir’s scathing attack on the bourgeoise was loathed by critics and audiences alike and then cut to pieces by a studio hoping to recoup its losses–I guess it was insanely expensive to make, though I don’t know why. Then, later, years later, the young Left Bank filmmakers in the 1950s pieced together the original and screened it at the Venice film festival where it was, almost instantly, proclaimed as one of the greatest films of all time. I mean, like, right away.

I don’t quite see that, but I do admire the movie. There’s the hunting scene and the numerous lunatic fight scenes amongst the guests and the help, the deep-focus photography and the roaming through the house, the goofy characters and the complex plot involving love affairs and jealousy, all of this undermined by everyone’s profound shallowness or stupidity or both. Its ending is bleak and not-bleak, it has been proclaimed dark and cynical and upbeat and charming by different luminaries, and, like great films and literature, it is all of those things.

I get bored by Rules of the Game, and I don’t know why. Whenever I watch it in a theater I seriously try again and again to be swallowed up by the story, and each time I am impressed by Renoir’s brilliant camerawork and his dexterity with the plot, and its many surprises. But it sure doesn’t help me that there’s no one to like. I think some people who love the movie also adore certain characters, but I find them all strained by their shortcomings–they’re so fucking shallow, and the people who are not shallow are compromised by very poor choices that are really frustrating to me.

Wim Wenders says, in his Criterion tribute, “I promise you: you will travel lighter after the film!” I just don’t, I emerge heavier, in fact, weighed down trying to grasp what people I respect grasp about this film. In fact, I’d say that I travel lighter after watching Wim Wenders’ movies, Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road, more than this masterpiece. Which is not a critique of Rules of the Game, but more an admission of failure to understand it on my part.