The Rules of the Game

Last week, I watched a movie called The Rules of the Game (1939), a French film that criticizes the extravagant lifestyle of the bourgeois. So, it doesn't come as a surprise that this film wasn't very well received in the French public. The director of the film, Jean Renoir, appealed to a theme prevalent in poetic realism--moral relativism--a concept that questions moral authority (the existence of absolute truths) and points out hypocrisy.

In The Rules of the Game, characters illustrated this theme by making statements throughout the movie like, "What is natural?" (when the main character Christine justifies her choice to wear purple lipstick) or "The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons." I also saw a deeper theme of the false illusion of morality...for example, twice in the film, two people mentioned that Christine and her husband had class, which is "a rare thing to find these days."

Yet, clearly in the movie, they had everything but class, at least with respect to their relationships (Christine's husband having a mistress, she trying to run off with someone else)...at the very end of the movie, a young lady named Jackie cries because she discovers that Andre, a man she loves, is dead, but she is then discouraged to show any display of public emotion when Christine tells her, "People are watching." Renoir seems to imply that the rich care solely about what people see. Trailer is below if you're interested in seeing it...