A review like this is one of the hardest for me to write. The Rules of the Game is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest films of all time. So, it kind of feels blasphemous for me to say that I don’t really think it’s all that good. I fear that criticizing it diminishes my credibility as a critic, since there are certain films that are basically untouchable. The thing is, I can see what merits The Rules of the Game has, so I don’t want to act like people that think it is great are wrong. All I’m saying here is that it really just didn’t do it for me. It’s not like I hate all of the old classics either. I’ve watched many and love a lot of them. If I’m being honest, though, I just didn’t really enjoy The Rules of the Game.

The Rules of the Game is considered a “comedy of manners.” To put that in layman’s terms, that basically means that it’s a satire on “modern” (modern at the time, of course) society, and that it shows many stereotypes in order to bring them into criticism. Context is very important in this case. The Rules of the Game is a French film that came out in 1939, and so we’re seeing French society at the onset of World War II. This may be very interesting to some, but it doesn’t really do it for me personally. Anyway, though, the vast majority of the movie takes place at a French chateau, where the rich and the poor wind up interacting with each other in very interesting ways. While there are definitely strong themes and statements on the bourgeois lifestyle, a lot of the actual plot involves many different romantic/sexual connections between the people at the party. There’s more than just love triangles to be found here. It’s more like we have love pentagons going on. This leads to a lot of the eventual conflict in the movie, so things do eventually get interesting when all of that goes down.

One of the problems here is that sometimes there are “objective” measures by which a film’s quality is discerned. There are definitely “objective” (I use the word in quotes only because it’s debatable whether these things are truly objective) things about The Rules of the Game that I can’t argue against, such as cinematic techniques like deep-focus cinematography that are utilized well, or the film’s strong themes and satire on the French culture of the time. I’m not going to argue that the movie is bad for these things, because it’s not. It’s a well-made movie, and I’m sure that for a certain subset of people it’s a really engaging movie. I’m just not in that particular subset.

Part of my personal problem with the movie is just its accessibility, which I do find to be important. If I can only recommend a movie to the most elite of film buffs, is it really that great of a movie then? I’m an American living in the 21st century, and so I just don’t feel a connection with a movie like this, and I’m sure many other people I talk to wouldn’t either. I’m able to recommend certain other classics to even some of the most casual audience members, but The Rules of the Game is a hard sell for me. For starters, it has a lot working against it for modern audiences. Many people won’t even watch a black-and-white film, so that can be hard enough to sell. However, The Rules of the Game isn’t even in English, so a black-and-white film with subtitles is even harder to recommend. There’s also a clear cultural barrier here, since a lot of the dialogue just came off as really strange to me. I thought it was pretty bad writing, but I can acknowledge that the movie takes place in a different time and place, so I chalk some of it up to that. Still, there were times where I just found the movie to be bizarre, and it winded up getting some unintentional laughs out of me. I’m not happy about bashing on a film classic in this way, but I just found the movie to be very hard to watch, and this is coming from someone who’s used to watching old and/or foreign films.

The biggest compliment I have for The Rules of the Game is that I found it got significantly better as it went along. I thought the first half was pretty bad, but in the second half it gets a lot more interesting, and the ending is just great. Without spoiling too much, it almost winds up going for a Great Gatsby kind of storyline in the end, which ended up being really interesting. I don’t know, it’s not like I didn’t enjoy The Rules of the Game at all, it just never really reached the pinnacle of “greatest movie of all time” heights for me. I don’t even really consider it to be a bad movie, I just think it’s kind of overrated. However, I can also acknowledge that the accessibility/cultural barrier is there for me, so that could be part of the problem here. In the end, if you’re just a casual movie lover, then if I’m being honest I don’t really recommend The Rules of the Game for you at all. Otherwise, I think it’s at least worth seeing what all the hype is about. I’m happy to have watched the movie, but I doubt I’ll ever want to watch it again.

3/5