February 19, 2004

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News

Hell hath no fury like an artistically enraged Parisian.

Stravinsky found this out in 1913, when the premiere of his daringly dissonant Rite of Spring brought a Theatre des Champs Elysees audience to the verge of rioting.

And Jean Renoir got the same treatment in 1939, when his masterpiece The Rules of the Game bowed at the Colisée. The Rules crowd was so incensed at what they saw that some burned newspapers in the theater. Or maybe they were just cold.

Both works survived their harsh receptions. Rite is now acknowledged as a clarion call of modernism. And Rules has a regular home on lists of the greatest films ever made. (In the most recent polls conducted by the British film magazine Sight & Sound, the critics placed it third, behind Citizen Kane and Vertigo, while the directors had it in a three-way tie for ninth, with Kurosawa's Rashomon and Seven Samurai./i> Pretty good company).

Good news

Now Rules has been inducted into the Criterion Collection (two dics, $39.95), which is rapidly becoming the place where canonized cinema goes to enter DVD immortality. This makes for doubly good news: Not only is the film available in the most modern format, it's also in the hands of the company that can do it justice. Indeed, Criterion's quest to create the best possible Rules disc reads like a miniature version of the film's initial resuscitation story.

The Rules of the Game faced a hard road from the start. The original distributors demanded 13 minutes of cuts before the disastrous premiere. Once Rules was released, its genre mixing and biting pre-World War II social satire were so roundly scorned that the producers made Renoir cut another 13 minutes after the opening weekend. The French government banned Rules when the war started, and in 1942, Allied bombers mistakenly destroyed the lab in Boulogne that housed the only complete negative. The film hastened Renoir's departure from France, but it was panned all over again when it premiered in New York in 1950.

You might call that an inauspicious beginning.

Tide turns

Then, in 1958, the tide began to turn. A couple of French cinephiles, Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, went on a mission. They loved The Rules of the Game, and they showed it by using all the available prints and shards of negatives to construct something resembling a definitive version, including many scenes and fragments that had been cut. Renoir, who helped with the reconstruction, burst into tears at the rebirth of his baby in 1959. Since then, Rules has been widely acknowledged as an all-time great.

Criterion's task wasn't quite as daunting, but it still had legwork to do. With no original negative to work with, Criterion was ready to roll with a duplicate negative. But, at the 11th hour, it uncovered a fine-grain master of the 1959 print, which is one generation closer to perfection for a DVD transfer. And lo and behold, The Rules of the Game now looks and sounds as good as it ever will.

So what was all the fuss about? Why has this film about an aristocratic outing in the country generated such outrage and admiration?

The aesthetics of Rules, like those of Rite, were ahead of their time. Renoir's use of the moving camera and composition in depth – which depicts actions unfolding, in focus, along varying planes of field – is now considered groundbreaking and poetic, a frequently cited example of how to open up space and story.

At the time, it was considered confusing. Ditto for the genre-shifting storyline, which starts with light romantic entanglement in Paris, moves on to an unsettling hunting sequence at a lush country home, peaks with an elaborate masquerade party and ends in murder. The parts would appear so disparate that many missed how perfectly they play off each other and click together.

But Rules was scorned more for its content than its form. The film was made in the shadow of the 1938 Munich Pact, in which England and France handed the Czech Sudetenland to Nazi Germany on a silver platter. Renoir was disgusted with this act of political appeasement, but he decided to make his point with a stinging comedy of manners, rather than a prophetic drama.

Courting controversy

The fading aristocrats of Rules form a picture of capitulation and moral cowardice. Renoir always gave his characters a humanist touch that bequeaths a benefit of the doubt; this is a big part of his legacy, along with his films' fluid camera work. But to a France soon to fall under Vichy rule, The Rules of the Game was like a red-hot poker.

"People go to the cinema in the hope of forgetting their everyday problems, and it was precisely their own worries that I plunged them into," Renoir wrote in My Life and My Films. "The imminence of war made them even more thin-skinned. I depicted pleasant, sympathetic characters, but showed them in a society in the process of disintegration, so that they were defeated at the outset. ... The audience recognized this. The truth is that they recognized themselves. People who commit suicide do not care to do it in front of witnesses."

Special features

Aside from the pristine transfer, the new set is remarkable for the raft of special features that put the film in historical and artistic context. The audio commentary, written by film scholar Alexander Sesonske and read by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, might even be too complete for its own good.

Mr. Sesonske has so much to say that his words are consistently a few beats ahead of the action. Renoir historian Christopher Faulkner lends a hand with an analysis of selected scenes, including an incisive look at Renoir's use of deep focus.

There's a BBC documentary directed by the curmudgeonly-but-knowledgeable David Thomson (who probably isn't pleased that his name is spelled wrong on the box), a discussion of the original restoration, and, as they say, much, much more.

Renoir died in 1979, after making much of his post-Rules output in Hollywood. But he would never make another film to match Rules or 1937's Grand Illusion, another gently biting look at the collapsing aristocracy. He remained stung by France's reaction to The Rules of the Game. But, like Stravinsky and other artists who were too far ahead of the curve, his place in history is secure. Even in Paris.