“L’Ancien Régime”

The Rules of the Game – Jean Renoir (1939)

The Rules of the Game is a comedy of manners which depicts the moral callousness of the French upper classes on the eve of the Second World War. The film depicts a tangled web of romantic involvement: André is in love with Christine, who is married to Robert, who just ended an affair Geneviève. Robert invites André and Genviève, and a mutual friend Octave (played by Renoir) to join him and his wife for a weekend of hunting at their country estate.

Upon its release, the Rules of the Game received mixed reviews and failed commercially. The film performed so poorly that it sunk the studio created by Jean Renoir and his brother Claude. “Rules” was rereleased in the mid-fifties, in a less toxic political environment, and was immediately hailed as a masterpiece.

The Earrings of Madame de… - Max Ophüls (1953)

“The Earrings of Madame de…” revolves around a pair of earrings given to Louise (Danielle Darrieux) by her husband, André (Charles Boyer) in commemoration of their marriage. Years later, she pawns the earrings in order to settle a gambling debt and claims to have lost them. The jeweler who buys the pawned earrings happens to be the original seller, and he offers André the opportunity to buy them back.

Ophüls has compared the story to a carousel, spinning constantly around the same axis (the earrings). Spinning is a central theme in the film; its most famous scene is a a ballroom dance sequence in which Louise and her lover, Baron Fabrizio Donati (Vittorio di Sica), spin, step, and break through four consecutive balls on four consecutive evenings, seemingly without interruption.

Although fifteen years and a World War separate the release dates of Ophüls’ and Renoir’s respective masterpieces, the films are more closely linked —stylistically and thematically—than the New Wave films that would follow. By the early sixties, a generation of grittier and more politically-minded cinéastes would render this style of moviemaking obsolete.