[6 OUT OF 6 STARS!]
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DON'T MISS! If we could, we'd give Renoir's masterwork 12 stars.”
– Time Out New York
“A TRIUMPH! SIMPLY DAZZLING… The bright glistening new 35mm restoration of The Rules of the Game brings to the fore a visual glamour that was blurred in the faded prints that have been circulating for decades. Watching it is like rediscovering the world after cataract surgery.”
– Stephen Holden, The New York Times
“If you imagine a world where the films of Bergman, Truffaut, Altman, Mike Leigh and Woody Allen (among others) don't yet exist, you can begin to understand the prodigious influence of this movie.”
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Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com. Read full review here
“Required viewing… A masterpiece!”
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Leslie Camhi, The Village Voice. Read full review here
“Simultaneously hilarious, tender, and caustic portrait of an isolated elite on the verge of extinction. It’s also considered one of the greatest films ever made.”
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Bilge Ebiri, New York magazine
 (1939) “Everyone has his reasons.” Record-breaking aviator Roland Toutain, fresh from a trans-Atlantic jaunt, addresses a radio audience from the tarmac, lamenting the absence of his lover, to whom he dedicated his flight. Unfortunately she’s Nora Gregor (in real life, fugitive-from-the-Nazis Princess Starhemburg), wife of Marquis Marcel Dalio, who’s got mistress troubles with très sophistiquée Mila Parély. Complicated enough when in Paris, but then the Marquis invites all to a shooting party at his chateau — with the gameskeeper, local poacher and Gregor’s maid adding their own below-stairs triangle. And amid pioneering deep focus photography that keeps multiple intrigues running simultaneously, bullets start flying not just at rabbits and grouse but at people, moving from sophisticated byplay to slapstick farce to tragedy, even with the bumbling Octave (played by director Renoir himself) providing playful, impassioned, and ironic commentary. On most lists of all-time great movies — often as number one — Rules is both a light, even frivolous, comedy of manners and a biting satirical look at a corrupt society under the shadow of war. And its exhibition history is a drama in itself: trimmed from Renoir’s ideal cut to 94 minutes, it was shortened another 13 minutes after a disastrous premiere (one enraged patron reportedly tried to torch the theater). Two months later, it was banned as “demoralizing” and, later, its negative was destroyed by Allied bombs. Then, in 1959, over 200 boxes of forgotten Rules material was unearthed, resulting in a reconstituted version hailed internationally as a lost masterpiece. But since the 1959 negative, source of all prints until now, was stitched together from multiple versions, the overall quality was a pale shadow of Renoir’s original. Now, thanks to painstaking digital restoration, Rules is at last viewable in a complete 35mm print in all its visual glory.
A JANUS FILMS RELEASE.
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Available at Amazon:
JEAN RENOIR: INTERVIEWS
edited by Bert Cardullo
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“As fresh, funny, and poignant as it ever was, and even more mysterious. How did Renoir do it?”
– J. Hoberman
“Every viewing is repaid with new strands of the story, new turns of the dialogue, new corridors of meaning — as if they had not been there all along but had grown in the interval between the last time you saw it and this time.”
– Luc Sante
“Stands above all other films because, quite simply, it has it all. If one movie can stand for all others, represent all that film can be, that film is The Rules of the Game.”
– Paul Schrader
“French film -- perhaps all film -- begins with Jean Renoir's 1939 'Rules of the Game.' Now it's back at the Film Forum in a print from a newly-restored negative. If you know it and love it, here's your chance to see it again. If you don't know it, here's your chance to be moved and amazed.”
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Jay Carr, am New York |
