DVD of the Week: The Rules of the Game

The only movie in the _Sight & Sound all-time top-ten list that also appeared on my ballot is Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” from 1939 (which I discuss in this clip). It’s one of the rare movies that seems truly musical in its inspiration—and which, like much great music, envelops an astonishing complexity of invention and depth of insight in emblematically straightforward expressions. It unfolds the darkest of mysteries in bright daylight and distills vast depths of experience in each iridescent phrase. There is, by the way, something to this nepotism business: Jean Renoir is, after all, one of the sons of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and, as is clear from his book “Renoir, My Father,” the son found artistry not just on canvases but in every aspect of his father’s existence. Art, for him, is, above all, a way of life, and the cinema is the art form that is best suited to embody the art of the life-artist. It’s no surprise that “The Rules of the Game,” Renoir’s greatest film, is also the one in which he plays, onscreen, a crucial role of antic yet poignant self-portraiture.