The Rules of the Game

Tomorrow evening is Frost's Descent (Shuangjiang), the last solar term of autumn — the first night of the year that actually freezes. It means: whatever is still growing stops tonight.

The Rules of the Game is exactly that night. Inside a French château, people keep flirting, hunting, dancing and covering for each other by the old rules, while the world under their feet has already frozen. It opened in July 1939 and was banned by the French government that October as 'depressing, morbid, immoral' and a bad influence on the young.

A film that was frostbitten, then thawed twenty years later. The night before Frost's Descent is the right night for it.

飞行员 André Jurieux 刚刚独自飞越大西洋，落地后却在电台直播里抱怨：那个说好来接他的女人没有出现。

他的老朋友 Octave 劝他：这次去乡间庄园做客，别越界。

庄园的主人是 Robert，他要维持体面；他的妻子 Christine 要弄清自己究竟爱谁；来做客的 Geneviève 是 Robert 的情人。楼上在演这一出，楼下在演另一出——猎场看守 Schumacher 盯着自己的妻子 Lisette，新来的杂役 Marceau 正在追她。

一场打猎，一场化装舞会。所有人都在别人的故事里跑错了位置。

From the poll's founding in 1952 through 2012, The Rules of the Game appeared in the top ten of every single Sight & Sound decennial critics' poll — no other film has done that. It ranked 10th in 1952, 3rd in 1962, 2nd in 1972, 1982 and 1992, 3rd in 2002, 4th in 2012, and 13th in 2022.

Its real contribution is putting a whole group of people inside one frame. Renoir almost never uses a close-up to tell you who matters: the camera tracks and pans through the château, through doors and windows, with a servant carrying a tray in the foreground, the host pretending not to notice in the middle distance, and someone crying at the back. You have to decide where to look — new in 1939, and the basic grammar of ensemble cinema ever since.

Renoir plays Octave himself: the man who carries messages between two social worlds and, in the end, saves nothing.

97% on Rotten Tomatoes (59 reviews, 9.80/10 average), 99 on Metacritic.

And it was a disaster on release. At the Colisée Theatre in Paris on 7 July 1939 the audience was largely made up of right-wing organisations, who booed; the actress Paulette Dubost recalled fights breaking out and someone trying to set fire to the theatre. It closed after three weeks for poor attendance. Renoir called it the biggest failure of his career at the time of its release.