I warned you about it and now it’s here. This week’s Indie Film is not only black & white but it is also in French. Go ahead, find a shot of whisky and take it; I’ll wait.
You’re back? Great, this will be easier now.
This week’s film is La Règle du Jeu, but you can (and should) call it The Rules of the Game. The French language is a double-edged sword. Apply the same rules you would to an actual sword and don’t use it unless (a) a professional taught you how, or (b) you want to make it easier for people to murder you.
The film was written and directed in 1939 by Jean Renoir, a famous French film director and the son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a famous Impressionist painter. It’s a satire about romances within and between upper and lower classes of French society. Some people refer to it as a comedy of manners. If you want to understand a comedy of manners and don’t have anyone to impress, Gosford Park (2001) is available on Netflix Instant Play. But you’re reading this because you have a date to impress—so take that second shot of booze and watch the original.
Why You’re Watching: It’s constantly showing up on lists of the best films ever made. And it’s only 106 minutes.
Why Your Date Will Be Impressed: It’s in black & white AND in French. The two most romantic movie-date genres, “black & white” and “French, subtitled” combine into an ultra-romantic movie-date genre that is capable of killing and eating the entrails of all other genres but, you know, in a sexy way.
Why Your Date Will Be Even More Impressed: It’s not Casablanca (1942). *
*Casablanca, otherwise known as the only black & white movie anyone has ever seen (not counting the beginning of Wizard of Oz (1939) when you were trying to sync it to Pink Floyd), is played out. **
**If for some reason you think Casablanca is not played out because it works great for you on dates, I also recommend the “pretend-you’re-yawning-and-stretching-arm-around-the-shoulder move”. This will certainly also work because you’re clearly living inside an episode of Saved By the Bell.
Casablanca? Sucks.
Something Impressive to Say Before the Movie: Though a lauded classic today, the film was not well received in 1939. Like really, really not well received. It was sort of banned by the French government. And by “sort of” I mean, “definitely”. You see, in pre-WWII France, if you made a movie about how rich people are assholes and then showed it to them—they didn’t like it.
Something Impressive to Say During the Movie: Jean Renoir plays Octave, one of the main characters. Sure, you will know this fact before the movie, but it will be more impressive if you gesture to the screen say, that’s “Jean Renoir” as if he was a dude on your floor hockey team. Who knows? Maybe you’re the kind of person who plays floor hockey with deceased French filmmaking geniuses? You’re just that mysteriously cool.
Something Impressive to Say After the Movie: You love the way Renoir uses deep focus shots to simultaneously capture something going on in the foreground, middle, and background. You wonder if it inspired Orson Welles to do the same in Citizen Kane (1941). You wonder, but you don’t know for sure because knowing intricate cinematic details is for movie nerds. You are just an awesome person—born with good taste—who happens to like all the right movies.
And you hate all the right ones too, but that’s next week.
