The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jean Renoir · La Règle du jeu · a film · 1939 · written with the collaboration of Carl Koch · in French · the reconstruction of 1959
Mode
Comedy of manners turned tragedy without changing key; ensemble chronicle, farce and indictment in one film
Mythos
The battue, the game driven to the guns, run twice, by day with rabbits and by night with a man; the comedy of masters and servants in love; the carnival of misrule; the dance of death among the revellers
Phase
From an aviator’s landing at Le Bourget at night to the night outside La Colinière, through an arrival, a hunt and a fête
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, mono sound, in French; Jean Bachelet’s photography, Eugène Lourié’s design, Marguerite Renoir’s cutting; music drawn from existing works, Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre among them; the reconstruction of 1959
Register
From slapstick in a bear costume to a body on the grass; tone that changes inside a single shot, the frame held open in depth
Scale
Two houses under one roof, masters and servants, a nation on the eve of war heard through a radio, and the code that holds them all
Governing Proposition
An aviator who has flown the Atlantic for a married woman follows her to her husband’s château in the Sologne, where masters and servants keep the rules of their stations through a hunt and a fête, until he is shot in the dark as the morning’s game was shot and the master announces it as an accident. The wager of the film is that an ensemble without a centre, staged in depth so that farce and danger share one frame, can show a society whose code permits adultery, slaughter and lies and forbids only sincerity, and in which everyone, the killer included, has his reasons.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at night at an airfield. André Jurieux, played by Roland Toutain, has flown the Atlantic, and at Le Bourget he lands to a radio microphone. Into the microphone he says that the woman he made the flight for did not come to meet him. In her apartment in Paris, Christine, played by Nora Gregor, hears him on the radio. A national hero has said in public, to everyone listening, the one thing the code of his world forbids, which is what he feels. The first scene sets the one man in the film who does not know the rules, and lets everyone else hear him break them.
Jean Renoir made it for his own company, La Nouvelle Édition Française, from a screenplay he wrote with the collaboration of Carl Koch, and it opened in Paris on 7 July 1939. Jean Bachelet photographed it in black and white, Marguerite Renoir edited it and Eugène Lourié designed it; the music is drawn from existing works, Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre among them. Renoir himself plays Octave, the friend of everyone, a hanger-on between the masters and the servants. The film is set in two places, Paris and a château in the Sologne called La Colinière, and moves in five movements: the city, the arrival and the servants’ table, the hunt, the fête and the night. Eleven principal roles divide almost evenly between masters and those who serve them, and no one holds more than a share of the film. The film seen since 1959 is the reconstruction made that year with Renoir’s approval, and that is the film judged here.
Christine’s husband is Robert de La Chesnaye, a marquis, played by Marcel Dalio, and before he has said much the film shows him among his automata, mechanical figures that keep perfect time, which give him his nature before he speaks: delighted, a little furtive, a master happiest among machines. The city act moves between Christine’s apartment, Robert’s house and the flat of Geneviève, played by Mila Parély, and out onto a road, where André, in despair, crashes his car with Octave beside him. Octave is the go-between, and in Paris he says the film’s most quoted line: “il y a une chose effroyable, c’est que tout le monde a ses raisons” (“there is one terrible thing: everyone has their reasons”). The film will hold to it to the end.
Movement II
At La Colinière, in the marshes of the Sologne, the masters receive their guests, among them the General, played by Pierre Magnier, Geneviève, Saint-Aubin, Octave and André. Christine is Austrian, a foreigner in the language of conduct around her as well as in French. The estate has its own staff: Corneille the majordomo, played by Eddy Debray; Lisette, Christine’s maid, played by Paulette Dubost; and Schumacher the gamekeeper, played by Gaston Modot, a man of rules held rigidly. A poacher, Marceau, played by Julien Carette, is taken into service in the house. The outsider is brought inside, and the house acquires one more person who will not keep to his place.
Below stairs the servants sit down to eat, and the film sets the second house beneath the first. It has its own hierarchy, its own order at table and its own gossip, and the gossip turns to the master’s origins. Robert is an outsider in his own house, and his kitchen knows it. The servants do not stand outside the code of their masters. They obey it at another pitch, as a second house under the same roof.
On a night at the château the guests say goodnight to one another across many doors along a corridor, in one moving shot, and the whole social order of the house becomes visible as traffic. Bachelet holds the focus through the depth of the rooms, so that several actions run in one frame and a servant’s crisis can play behind a master’s. The camera moves through the house as a guest would and stops where a servant would. No one is the centre of the frame for long. The film has found the form for what it knows, which is that the rules hold everyone at once.
Movement III
In the morning the guests go out to shoot. Beaters move through the Sologne in a line, tapping as they go, and drive the animals toward the guns. The guns fire, and the animals fall. A rabbit curls as it dies. The sequence is cut with an exactness unlike the rest of the film, the rhythm of beaters, guns and falling animals assembled into something close to documentary, and the comedy of manners stops for it. The natural order is shown under use, the marsh as an estate and the creatures in it as a sport.
During the shoot Christine takes up a spyglass. She trains it on a squirrel in a tree, and watches it. Then the glass turns, and in it she sees her husband with Geneviève, kissing. The instrument of a naturalist becomes the instrument of a discovery, and the discovery is of a kind the code permits, provided no one says it aloud. Christine has seen it, and the film has shown her seeing it, through the same glass that a moment before was trained on an animal.
The hunt is the film’s hinge. It is a battue: the game is not pursued but driven, by men who work for the guests, toward men who wait with guns. Everything later in the film will be measured against this morning. When the night comes, the same structure will be run again, and the game will be a man. The film does not say so here. It shows the rabbits, and lets them be remembered.
Movement IV
In the evening the house holds a fête, and the guests put on an entertainment for one another. Robert’s orchestrion, a mechanical organ, plays, and he stands beside it, shown at the height of his own happiness among machines. Then the lights go down for the Danse macabre: figures in skeleton costume move among the guests in the dark, carrying lights, to Saint-Saëns. The dance of death enters the party in its oldest form, and the guests take it as part of the programme.
The house turns over. Marceau the poacher and Schumacher the gamekeeper chase each other through the rooms among the guests, and the masters’ affairs and the servants’ run through the house together. A revolver is fired, and the camera goes from room to room while the guests applaud it as part of the entertainment. Octave, in a bear costume, cannot get out of it. The carnival of misrule is played at full tilt, and the farce and the danger occupy one space because they are one thing.
In the middle of it Robert gives his majordomo an order: “Corneille! Faites cesser cette comédie!” (“Corneille! Stop this farce!”). Corneille answers, “Laquelle, Monsieur le marquis?” (“Which one, sir?”). Every couple in the house is acting a part, and the servant has seen the problem the master has not: there is no single comedy to stop. The fête is the whole society performing for itself, and the code that permits every lie is about to be asked to absorb a death.
Movement V
The night moves outside the house. Octave stands alone on the steps and, to no one, conducts the orchestra he never led, the failed musician at the edge of a party. Christine wears a cape lent to her by Lisette, and in the dark the cape decides who will die. André runs toward the greenhouse, and Schumacher, whose rigidity has turned lethal, shoots him. He falls on the grass, and his death is told in the terms of the morning’s rabbits. The battue has been run a second time, by the rules of the house, and no one in it has acted from malice.
Robert comes out onto the steps and announces to his guests that there has been an accident. Within minutes the killing has been absorbed by the code that made it. The General gives his judgment that La Chesnaye has class, “et ça devient rare” (“and that is becoming rare”). The guests go back in, and their shadows move along the wall of the house. The film ends on the shadows: a society going in for the night, intact, having lost the one man among it who meant what he said.
The film was banned twice, and for twenty years it existed only in mutilated versions; the original negative was lost. In 1959 a reconstruction made with Renoir’s approval returned it whole, and from then on it became a touchstone of the French New Wave and of the criticism that followed André Bazin, for whom its depth staging and long takes were a founding text. Robert Altman’s ensemble films carry its form openly, Gosford Park (2001) most of all. The readings of it have multiplied without cancelling: a comedy of manners after Marivaux and Musset, an indictment of a class on the eve of war, an elegy for the Popular Front, a film about a Jewish master in a house that discusses his origins. Each return finds a second story in the back of a shot. The film keeps its first rule: everyone has their reasons.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, scene by scene, and most of the film resists it. Le Bourget sets the one man who does not know the rules, telling a radio microphone that the woman he flew the Atlantic for did not come. Robert’s automata give the master his nature before he speaks. The car crash puts André’s despair and Octave’s place as go-between on the road. The servants’ table sets the second house beneath the first. The hunt is the hinge: the spyglass turns from a squirrel to a husband, and the slaughter rehearses the ending. What gives: the pursuit through the house runs past its point once its doubling of masters and servants is made, and some guests, Saint-Aubin above all and the gag figures at the fête, are furniture.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds. A society runs on codes of conduct that permit adultery, slaughter and lies, and forbid only sincerity; the man who takes love literally is the one it kills, and within minutes the master announces the killing to his guests as an accident, and the code absorbs it. The servants’ house obeys the same law at another pitch, so what is disclosed is an order, not a class’s vices. Beneath it lies Octave’s line, that the terrible thing is that everyone has their reasons, and the film keeps that refusal of a villain to the end, even for Schumacher. It discloses through image as much as word, down to the guests’ shadows on the wall. Held below the top because the eve of war is felt rather than opened.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The elevation is of dread more than of beauty, and it comes in a few great passages: the hunt, beaters tapping through the Sologne and the animals driven to the guns, a rabbit curling as it dies; the Danse macabre at the fête, figures in skeleton costume moving among the guests in the dark with lights; Octave alone on the steps at night, conducting the orchestra he never led; Robert beside his orchestrion as it plays, a man at the height of his own happiness among machines; the last shadows along the façade. What holds the axis lowest is frequency. Between these passages the register is comedy and the film does not reach for lift, which is right for it, and leaves the heights few.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built, and its central structure bears load: the battue, in which beaters drive the game toward the guns, run again at night with a man as the game. André is shot running toward the greenhouse, and his death is told in the terms of the morning’s rabbits. Two inherited forms bear load around it: the comedy of masters and servants in love, from Beaumarchais, whose Le Mariage de Figaro the opening titles quote; and the carnival of misrule, the house turned over while a poacher and a gamekeeper chase each other among the guests. The particular stays particular: a cape lent from maid to mistress decides who dies. Held below the top because the myths are several and partly theatrical, used as frames as much as built from within.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance was the French poetic realism of the later 1930s, Renoir’s own La Bête humaine (1938) and the films of Carné and Prévert among it, with its doomed lovers and fatal atmosphere, and beside it the boulevard comedy of adultery. The film refuses both: a fatal ending with no fatalism, a farce that kills, a large cast with no hero, and a tone that changes inside a single shot. The stake was high and it was paid: the film was banned twice, and for twenty years it existed only in mutilated versions. Held below the top because part of the turn was prepared in Renoir’s own work, in the depth staging and the mobile ensemble of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) and La Grande Illusion (1937).
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is that the rules hold everyone at once, and the form is an ensemble without a centre, staged in depth so that several actions run in one frame and a servant’s crisis plays behind a master’s. In the château corridor at night the guests say goodnight across many doors in one moving shot, the social order visible as traffic. At the fête a revolver is fired and the guests applaud it as entertainment: farce and danger occupy one space because they are one thing. As melodrama it would mourn André; as farce it would forgive everyone; it does both, and that is what it says. Held a step below the top because the Paris act is staged more conventionally than the château.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Eighty-seven years of return are the evidence, and the readings remain incompatible: a comedy of manners after Marivaux and Musset; an indictment of the French ruling class on the eve of war; an elegy for the Popular Front; the founding text of André Bazin’s account of depth and the long take; a film about a Jewish master in a house whose kitchen discusses his origins. It yields formally on return: the background of a depth shot holds a second story the first viewing missed; the cape that kills is introduced long before it matters; the automata and the orchestrion rhyme with the guests’ mechanical courtesies. It yields morally too, as sympathy shifts on each viewing between Robert, Christine, Octave, Lisette and even Schumacher. Held below the top only by span, decades against centuries.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is the fullest working, before Citizen Kane (1941), of staging in depth with a moving camera, a grammar in which the frame holds a society rather than a person; with it the ensemble film of interlocking stories, and farce and tragedy mixed at full strength. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, since the film was banned, cut and largely unseen for twenty years, and discounted for that; then very wide from 1959, when the reconstruction became a touchstone of the French New Wave and of the criticism that followed Bazin. Robert Altman’s ensemble films carry it openly, Gosford Park (2001) most of all. Held a step down by the delay, and because part of the force belongs to Renoir’s films before it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Eighty-seven years of survival, and the evidence is uneven. The defining form is whole in the reconstruction of 1959, made with Renoir’s approval; the loss of the original negative is a charge to the fabric, and the repair has made it good. Presence was broken for twenty years, while the film stood banned and existed only in mutilated versions; since 1959 it has been continuous and very wide. The surface fixed to its moment, the aviator as national hero, the radio reporter, the marquis’s estate, is part of the subject and has aged as history rather than as fashion. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. With the two broken decades and the lost negative charged, the evidence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Jean Bachelet’s photography holds focus through depth in interiors and in the open marsh, and the camera moves through rooms as a guest would and stops where a servant would. The hunt is cut with an exactness unlike the rest of the film, beaters, guns and falling animals assembled into a sequence of documentary force. The sound is direct and layered: the orchestrion, the piano, the shots, the guests’ talk overlapping. The ensemble is the other instrument: Dalio’s Robert, delighted and furtive; Carette’s Marceau; Modot’s Schumacher, whose rigidity turns lethal; Dubost’s Lisette. The costs: Nora Gregor’s Christine is stiff and her French halting at the centre of the love plot, Renoir’s own Octave is loose at moments, and the fête’s pursuit loses precision in places.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bear costume Octave cannot get out of at the fête, and André dead on the grass by the greenhouse. One law governs both: everyone acts by the rules of his station and his reasons, and the rules decide who survives, not anyone’s malice. In the middle of the chaos Robert orders his majordomo, “Corneille! Faites cesser cette comédie!” (“Corneille! Stop this farce!”), and is answered, “Laquelle, Monsieur le marquis?” (“Which one, sir?”): the law spoken aloud. The servants’ house obeys the same physics at a lower pitch, and the two killings, by day and by night, obey one logic of the battue. The range is as wide as any film of its decade. The strain: the more conventional Paris act sits a little apart, and the fête’s knockabout once or twice escapes.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders held in one structure: class, as two houses under one roof; the nation on the eve of war, in a national hero, a General and a radio audience; modernity, in the aeroplane, radio, car and automata; the natural order, in the Sologne marsh and the hunt; love and marriage, in four couples and their codes; art, in the fête, the music and Octave’s lost career; the outsider, in Robert’s origins, Christine’s Austrian foreignness and the poacher taken into service; and death. They are joined through the house and the code. What holds the axis is what is absent or thin: labour is seen only as service, the family has no children and no generations, the sacred is absent but for the dance of death, and history is the eve of war felt, not entered.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 9.1, then The Unconcealment, The Made and The Inner Law at 9.0. An ensemble without a centre, staged in depth, in which farce and danger share one frame because they are one thing; eighty-seven years of incompatible readings and a second story in the back of every shot; a society whose code forbids only sincerity, shown killing the one sincere man and absorbing it; a making in which photography, cutting, sound and ensemble bear weight; and one law that runs from a bear costume to a body on the grass.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.4: the hunt, the dance of death, Octave on the steps, Robert at his orchestrion and the last shadows rise, but between them the register is comedy and the heights are few. Above it, The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed at 8.6: myths several and partly theatrical, frames as much as structures built from within; and a world that holds class, nation, modernity, nature, love, art and death, with labour seen only as service, no children, no sacred but the dance of death and history felt rather than entered.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Imperishable at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.4, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.8 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of La Règle du jeu in the reconstruction of 1959, made with Renoir’s approval, which is the film as it has been seen since and is judged here as the released film of 7 July 1939 repaired; the history of loss bears on survival only, and no axis is credited for material the reconstruction restored. Directed by Jean Renoir for La Nouvelle Édition Française from his screenplay written with the collaboration of Carl Koch, photographed by Jean Bachelet, edited by Marguerite Renoir, designed by Eugène Lourié. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the French film; English renderings are the desk’s own, an aid to the viewer rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. French is quoted only where its words are certain, and the aviator’s words at the microphone and the telling of André’s death are described rather than quoted. Facts that could not be verified, among them the running times of the versions, the contents of the material restored in 1959, the film’s reception at its premiere, the arrangers and the other works drawn on for the music, and the film’s place in particular polls, are not given.