Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3504 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-06-02
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Full Screen, PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

Special Features
French
Region 2
Directors Biography
Documentary On The Making Of The Film
English

Synopsis
Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's masterpiece THE RULES OF THE GAME is a devastating satire of the pre-WWII French aristocracy. Starring Marcel Dalio as wealthy landowner Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye, it charts the shifting relationships among the guests at a weekend hunting party on his vast estate. The guest list includes Robert's mistress Genevieve (Mila Parely), from whom he's trying to part, and Andre Jurieu (Roland Toutain), a famed aviator who is in love with Robert's wife, Christine (Nora Gregor). As they begin a dizzy dance of escape and pursuit, their games are observed and echoed by the servants below the stairs. The gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot) is trying to keep the poacher, Marceau (Julien Carette), from poaching on his pretty wife, Lisette (Paulette Dubost), unaware that his boss also has his eye on her. The passionate Jurieu, the only guest incapable of the appropriate hypocrisy, finds Christine in an embrace with a random lover (Pierre Nay), and the startled woman decides to leave Robert and go away with the aviator. Renoir's subtle deployment of long tracking shots in multiplanar deep focus reveals the relations of both groups and individuals as he dismantles the rituals of hypocrisy that make this society run smoothly.

Customer Reviews

Better than predicted!
On watching it my wife decided she had ordered the wrong film. Not a promising start! However it is not bad, actually quite funny in places, quite compelling observations of the social hierarchy at the time and very distinctively French. What was the Revolution for? Bring back the guillotine! Not very sympathetic characters anyway. The film could be rated highly for what it was when it was made, but much of that is dated or taken for granted nowadays, (...).

best foreign picture ever goes to.......
I first viewed this film a few years ago now, then i was amazed and confused by it. i have seen it at least 10 times since and love every viewing. the plot is genius, renoir tackling the subject of different classes. though not dividing them but showing we are all the same, striving for something better and in this case love and lust. it is poigniant, hilarious, sad, dark, i could go on... personally i rate this as the second best film of all time (nothing betters citizan kane but it is the only film that is remotely close).

Funny, true and touching
I won't go on about it but I liked this film a lot. It is mostly a comedy about the social mores of the super rich, but it's a really well done piece of observation about different attitudes to adultery and love. I recommend it to anyone who likes well-made old films.