Film Reviews

THE RULES OF THE GAME “What is natural, these days?” a lady dressing for the evening asks her maid, who finds Madame’s violet lipstick a bit too artificial. The year is 1939, the place Paris, after the Munich Conference’s false promises of peace and on the eve of Hitler’s deadly march across Europe. The question, tossed off in the first few minutes of The Rules of the Game, is like so much else in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece, at once frivolous and poignant — a melancholy lament for a world gone awry, delivered in a tone so light you might think you had missed it. The film follows the amorous exploits of a group of aristocrats invited to a hunting party at a French chateau. Their spineless yet sympathetic host, the wealthy, Jewish Marquis de la Chesnaye (brilliantly played by Marcel Dalio), entertains himself with mechanical toys when he’s not attempting to rid himself of a cumbersome mistress. Meanwhile, his beautiful, foreign-born wife (Nora Gregor, the stage name of an Austrian princess) must contend with the adoration of a dashing aviator (Roland Toutain) — a romantic hero thrust into a society devoid of illusions. Renoir himself is unforgettable as the friend and hanger-on Octave, a failed artist haunted by a sense of missed opportunities. Their hectic intrigues find an uncanny echo in the affairs of their servants, upstairs and downstairs comically crossing paths on the way to a tragic conclusion. The dazzlingly labyrinthine script never mentions the coming war, yet its menace permeates a milieu that seems to have lost all moral compass, and where the ideal of happiness has been sacrificed to one of mere amusement. The Rules of the Game provoked something like a riot at its Parisian premiere. “People who commit suicide do not care to do it in front of witnesses,” Renoir said of the French response to his film, which, beneath its frothy veneer, showed their society going down the drain. The film was cut twice, and its original negative was destroyed by Allied bombing. The occasion for this re-release is its complete restoration from a master print. It is required viewing, if only to understand the ideal that filmmakers from Robert Altman to Woody Allen have been after. Even if you think you know it, see it again for its newly rediscovered depth of field, and even more, for its infinite wellsprings of character and empathy. (Nuart) (Leslie Camhi)

THE TIGER AND THE SNOW In an apparent attempt to revive the lukewarm blend of tragedy and comedy achieved in his concentration-camp-set Life Is Beautiful , Roberto Benigni here plays out a madcap tale of romantic obsession against the backdrop of the Iraq invasion. The results are neither profound nor funny. Benigni casts himself as Attilio, a university professor who is shown early in the film expounding platitudes on poetic inspiration to a lecture hall of multicultural students, who laugh with unrealistic spontaneity at his Robin Williams–esque antics. This doggerel Dante has his own Beatrice: a woman who appears to him as his bride in recurring dreams, and then seems to materialize in the flesh as Vittoria (Benigni’s real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi), a writer working on a biography of Attilio’s friend Fuad (Jean Reno). The film shifts from banal to tasteless as the war begins. Fuad calls Attilio from Baghdad, informing him that Vittoria has been severely injured. Attilio rushes to Iraq to save her. Perhaps somewhere in Tiger lies a dim Bush parable: Attilio as bumbling, narcissistic go-it-aloner, stumbling into Iraq with ill-conceived intentions. But the metaphor doesn’t hold: The outcome of this mess we’re in won’t leave Bush a benighted romantic. (Music Hall; One Colorado) (Ed Halter)  

(Photo by Teresa Isasi)

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