Description

Considered one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis’ country château lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances. The film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the premiere audience in 1939, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II; it wasn’t reconstructed until 1959. That version, which has stunned viewers for decades, is presented here.

Special Features

• High-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Introduction to the film by director Jean Renoir
• Audio commentary written by film scholar Alexander Sesonske and read by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
• Comparison of the film’s two endings
• Selected-scene analysis by Renoir historian Chris Faulkner
• Excerpts from Jean Renoir, le patron: La Règle et l’exception (1966), a French television program by filmmaker Jacques Rivette
• Part one of Jean Renoir, a two-part 1993 BBC documentary by film critic David Thompson
• Video essay about the film’s production, release, and 1959 reconstruction
• Interview with film critic Olivier Curchod
• Interview from a 1965 episode of the French television series Les écrans de la ville in which Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand discuss their reconstruction and rerelease of the film
• Interviews with set designer Max Douy, Renoir’s son, Alain; and actress Mila Parély
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by Sesonske; writings by Jean Renoir, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bertrand Tavernier, and François Truffaut; and tributes to the film by J. Hoberman, Kent Jones,Paul Schrader, Wim Wenders, Robert Altman, and others