La Regle Du Jeu

 

 

France

BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING
(1932, b/W) Director: Jean Renoir
This film from 1932 shows Renoir's gift for storytelling and comedy: a libidinous bookseller rescues a curmudgeonly old tramp called Boudu from the river; the man comes to live with him and his wife, and starts trying to seduce the maid with whom the master of the house is having a very bourgeois affair - and generally disrupts the good order of his home and livelihood.

No good deed goes unpunished, they say, and the preposterous, impossible Boudu becomes a nemesis, pursuing his rescuer for one impulsive and intensely regretted act of kindness. There is still a terrific energy to the street scenes and crowd scenes - which serve, in one brilliant and audacious moment, as a cheeky metaphor for the sexual act itself.

DROLE DE DRAME
(1937, black-and-white) Director: Marcel Carne
This early collaboration of Carne and Jacques Prevert spins a web of fantasy about its chosen theme - the flatfooted detective story - and makes one regret that this was their only comedy before they went on to such masterpieces as Les Enfants de Paradis and Jour se Leve.

UN CHIEN ANDALOU
(1929. Black-and-white) Director: Luis Bunuel
Un Chien Andalou has become one of the most notorious films in cinema history. Now regarded as a surrealist masterpiece, its makers, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, set out - in Dali's words - to conceive a film which 'would plunge right into the heart of witty, elegant and intellectualised Paris with all the weight of an Iberian dagger'.

LOULOU
(1980, Colour) Director: Maurice Pialat
Loulou is not easy viewing and this is a far from conventional cinematic depiction of relationships. Typically for a Pialat film, fists fly, women are slapped around and there’s a harsh word or two spoken. That’s putting it very mildly, since the wonderfully earthy script is ripe and laced with bitterness, cruelty and black humour. There are a number of issues confronted in the film. To a large degree it’s an autobiographical exorcism – Pialat drawing from a painful episode in his own personal history to confront the flaws and weaknesses in his own temperament and behaviour.

LA REGLE DU JEU
(1939, Black-andwhite) Director: Jean Renoir
Renoir's masterpiece on social class in decay was made in the full knowledge that the world was about to plunge into war. A party of elegant and charming people spend a weekend at a country chateau. They are not vindictive or pathological. Their 'sin' is something much less obviously abnormal. It consists of having no values at all...

 

 

 

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