CINEMASOPHY: A Dialogue of Eras — February Films
Art design: huxley.media via Photoshop
Cinema, an inseparable part of our lives, entertains while persistently raising sharp and uncomfortable questions. A lot can be said about a person based on the films they watch and love. Over the past half-century, at least thousands of lists of great movies have emerged — films every curious individual should watch to discover something about themselves.
For the next 12 months, this column will feature «alternative» cinema — perhaps not the loudest, but certainly extraordinary and profound. Films that deserve to be watched. Watched and loved. These are 24 stories of love, hate, actions, violence, and death. Stories about everything that cinema truly embodies.
«THE RULES OF THE GAME» (LA RÈGLE DU JEU, FRANCE, 1939)
Director: Jean Renoir
Cast: Roland Toutain, Jean Renoir, Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Gaston Modot
It was from this film that Woody Allen learned the art of wit, crafting his signature elegant paradoxes. Neurotics, beautiful women, intrigues, fatal passions, skeletons in the closet, adultery, subtly veiled homosexuality and attempts to transplant ancient theater into a modern setting — all of this originates from this 1939 masterpiece.
Without The Rules of the Game, there would be no iconic high-society comedies like Manhattan (1979) or Celebrity (1998). Even at 89, Allen continues to draw generously from it. Yes, his influences include Bergman, Wilder, and Fellini, but The Rules of the Game remains the wellspring of his so-called «intellectual glamour».
Just consider how much this plot resembles a quintessential Woody Allen story: an aviator, André Jurieux (Roland Toutain) — a hero of a record-breaking solo transatlantic flight and a poetic soul, rivaling none other than Charles Lindbergh — announces to the entire nation that he is utterly heartbroken because his beloved failed to meet him at the airfield.
The beloved who fails to appreciate the heroic feat of the lone aviator is none other than Marquise Christine de la Chesnaye (Nora Gregor), the wife of an Austrian aristocrat, Robert (Marcel Dalio), a collector of mechanical musical instruments. Octave (played by the director himself, Jean Renoir), a friend to both André and Christine, convinces Robert to invite the heartbroken aviator to his lavish estate for a hunting weekend and a specially arranged theatrical performance.
Robert agrees, hoping that this diversion will help him settle old scores with his mistress, Geneviève. Meanwhile, the servants, ever watchful, seize every opportunity to gossip about their masters’ entangled affairs. Christine’s maid, Lisette, encounters her husband, Schumacher, the gamekeeper, who pleads with her to leave the estate and join him in his forest lodge.
However, Lisette catches the eye of Marceau, a poacher turned servant in Robert’s household. The jealous gamekeeper begins to chase down his rival, eventually firing a gun at him within the estate grounds. The bewildered guests swept up in the evening’s entertainment, mistake the gunshots for part of the theatrical performance.
Jean Renoir, the son of the great French Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir — who himself was no stranger to high-society portraiture — tells a story about how a class, whether bourgeois or aristocratic, instinctively closes ranks when faced with an external threat, baring its fangs in the process and staging a ritualistic sacrifice.
Drawing from Alfred de Musset’s play The Caprices of Marianne, Renoir disguises the narrative as a Beaumarchais-style theatrical comedy, only to deliver a biting tragicomedy instead. It is a story of what happens when a naive outsider is drawn into someone else’s game and attempts to break its rigid rules.
The Rules of the Game is a problematic film. Made at great expense, it initially flopped at the box office, and a second release attempt led to an arson attack on a cinema and an official ban. At the time, nationalist critics took offense at the portrayal of French aristocrats with Jewish mothers and German wives (the marquise was played by the wife of a pretender to the Austrian throne). The film was effectively «canceled».
During World War II, the film’s original negative was destroyed in a bombing raid. It wasn’t until 1960 that two cinephiles unearthed 200 cans of raw footage and reconstructed the film in its original form (minus one missing minute). Today, The Rules of the Game is recognized as a masterpiece, essential to the development of modern cinema in all its refined complexity. Renoir aimed not merely to provide «an exact description of the bourgeoisie of our time» but to paint a portrait of the very nature of bourgeois society — one that has changed little since.
The film’s cinematography, with its depth of field and fluid camera movements, is impeccable. Renoir accentuates the theatricality not just on screen but within the characters themselves, who masterfully practice the art of elegant pretense. He crafts a portrait of a man who fills the emptiness of his life by acting as an intermediary in the romantic entanglements of others.
This is Jean Renoir’s most significant film (preceded by Grand Illusion two years earlier — another masterpiece, which Joseph Goebbels denounced as «cinema enemy No. 1» for portraying not just the decline of aristocracy but of classical culture itself). The Rules of the Game remains one of the finest achievements of French cinema. With humor masking its brutality and pessimism, Renoir consciously tells the story not just of the decline of old Europe but of the world at large.
In essence, this film, made on the eve of World War II, is Parasite before Parasite. Like Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece, The Rules of the Game juxtaposes the world of masters and servants, beginning as a farcical comedy of manners before transforming into a haunting, piercing tragedy. It is a film whose brilliance lies in its masterful synthesis of artistic techniques — using every cinematic and literary device available at the time. Through deep-focus shots, long takes, and fluid camera movements, Renoir turns a seemingly theatrical setting into a dynamic, shifting space through which an entire society parades — like guests at a masquerade, unaware of the tragedy about to unfold.
«ELLE» (FRANCE, GERMANY, BELGIUM, 2016)
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Christian Berkel, Anne Consigny
On the Indiscreet Charm of the Modern European Bourgeoisie.
Elle, directed by 78-year-old Paul Verhoeven (now 86), the auteur behind the cult classic Basic Instinct (1992) — a borderline pornographic thriller disguised as Hollywood mainstream — and Showgirls (1995) — a tale of the American Dream masquerading as an industrial porno about sex as a tool of power.
Elle is a provocative black comedy about the depraved morals of the new European aristocracy. Verhoeven has packed his masterpiece with the most explosive topics — ranging from feminism, harassment, and sadomasochism to racism, yoga, and video games about rape.
The protagonist, wealthy and solitary Parisian Michèle Leblanc (in one of Isabelle Huppert’s finest performances, awarded at Cannes), casually tells three friends over dinner at a restaurant that she was raped in her own home.
Verhoeven raises the question: Was it really rape? In terms of experienced trauma, that is. Because for Michèle, it appears to be nothing more than an extreme experience that adds some spice to her sterile, politically correct, and emotionally cold routine — a fantasy, a subconscious projection, a variation of the video games her company develops in large quantities. It’s no coincidence that she «reboots» the rape scene in her imagination as if it were a game.
Whether this is the case becomes (somewhat) clear as we delve deeper into Michèle’s life and learn about her family: a father who is a serial killer, the embodiment of Europe’s colonial and Nazi past; a mother who swaps gigolos-like gloves; a pathetic, spoiled son who quits the only job he’s ever had — at McDonald’s — after his car breaks down, as he refuses to take the metro due to the «non-ecological» air.
Verhoeven takes it even further, showing how the young man fails to notice that his girlfriend has given birth to a Black child, how Michèle’s lover — a married man, as is customary in her circles — is casually handed over to his wife, just as her grandparents’ generation handed Jews over to the Germans; and how her ex-husband is a hapless and impractical intellectual writer.
The family serves as a group portrait of modern Europe — the very same Europe Verhoeven already put on trial in Black Book (2006), where he exposed the hypocrisy of the Old World: the one that eagerly embraced Nazism, only to later take revenge not on the occupiers but on their helpless «mistresses».
Michèle herself is the archetype of a cynical, aging hedonist, capable of empathizing only with distant, abstract suffering — a «third-age» consumer, the perfect offspring of Parisian «intellectualism» and pornography, which French cultural elites have long elevated to the status of national heritage.
This film is sharp, witty, and at times cruel — a biting exposé of European consumer society. It is an unflinching truth spoken to the world by an incredibly talented filmmaker standing at the threshold of eternity.
CINEMASOPHY: A Dialogue of Eras — January Films
