No need to worry. The Renoir film is not just for intellectuals, though I wouldn’t rule them out.  Its unpopularity when first shown in 1939 is considered a mystery, and was probably to do with the dreadful state of France then, socially and politically, so that the aristocratic fun and games were taken as an insult to the French ruling class, which was not at all Renoir’s intention. The comparison with Nozze di Figaro is useful here. Mozart/da Ponte were surely critical of the society they depicted, just as Renoir was, but their social criticism is surpassed by the dramas of the individuals they all three so lovingly created. The night-time mistaken-identity in the garden of La règle du jeu is like the last act of Mozart’s Figaro, only with a tragic ending.

Notes on people

Jean Renoir (Octave): the painter’s son.

Marcel Dalio (Marquis): French actor, went to Hollywood and became inter alia the croupier in Casablanca.

Nora Gregor (Marquise, Christine): Austrian Jewish parents, was married to the Fascist vice-chancellor under Dollfuss, Prince von Staremberg, who emigrated and joined the Free French forces.

Roland Toutain (Jurieu, the pilot) was an actor, acrobat, and stuntman.

Paulette Dubost (Lisette): died aged 100 in 2011.

Gaston Modot (Schumacher, husband of Lisette), was painted by Modigliani.

Julien Carrette (the poacher, Marceau), was killed in an accident in his sixties, having set fire to himself in bed.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is a domestique anglais in one of the kitchen scenes. He organized the shooting scenes and killed the rabbits because Renoir didn’t like to do that.

Cartier-Bresson said, 50 years later, that this film was ‘a premonition of everything that was to happen in the world’.

Renoir said: ‘I think everything has been said about La règle du Jeu, including that, in the process of making it, I rediscovered the Classics.’ Probably meaning: Beaumarchais, Marivaux, and de Musset.