The Rules of the Game

The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu, 1939) — watch online on iFILM. Jean Renoir wrote, directed and starred in this French comedy-drama set among the Parisian upper class on the eve of war — a film that audiences booed at its premiere, that the French government briefly banned, and that critics eventually placed among the greatest films ever made.

Aviator André Jurieux has just crossed the Atlantic solo and announces over the radio that he did it for a woman who didn't even come to the airport to meet him. That woman is Christine, wife of the Marquis de la Chesnaye. The Marquis is trying to end an affair. The gamekeeper has his own domestic entanglement. The servants have their rivalries. Over a country-house weekend of hunting and late-night theatrics, all these separate threads pull taut at once.

Renoir filmed his satire of French complacency months before the German occupation. The social class he was mocking had no interest in being told they were sleepwalking into catastrophe — which is precisely what makes the film sting even now. Restored in the late 1950s after years of suppression, it runs 110 minutes. Stream The Rules of the Game (1939) online on iFILM.