Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La Règle du jeu is a scathing critique and satire of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners. As he wrote the script, Renoir called the film “an exact description of the bourgeoisie of our time.”

By February 1939 it no longer seemed evident that the surrender of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler at Munich had “saved the peace.” Soon a sense of doom would hang over Europe. In this atmosphere Jean Renoir, anticipating war and deeply troubled by the mood he felt around him, thought he might best interpret that state of mind by creating a story in the spirit of French comic theater, from Marivaux to de Musset, a tradition in which the force that sets every character in motion is love and the characters have no other occupation to interfere with this pursuit.

The result was La Règle du jeu, a dazzling accomplishment, original in form and style, a comic tragedy, absurd and profound, graced by two of the most brilliant scenes ever created. It is also, in the words of Dudley Andrew, “the most complex social criticism ever enacted on the screen.” A total box office failure in 1939, La Règle du jeu now ranks as one of the greatest masterpieces of world cinema. (...)

Booed, banned, nearly destroyed, La Règle du jeu was reconstructed in 1959 with the approval of Jean Renoir. Thus you are afforded a privilege available to no one when the film was new: that of seeing La Règle du jeu as Jean Renoir intended it, a film embraced by audiences and critics around the world as a timeless representation of Renoir’s genius.

Shown with French roast by Fabrice O. Joubert

Q&A with Jonathan Kiefer, film critic at the SN&R and other media, follows the Saturday screening.