I was intrigued by a long review on this site detailing the reasons for the reviewer's dislike of the film, since I am also at a loss to understand the film's status. I can defend the film against the reviewer's comments: yes, Christine is vacuous (although also a naive stranger in a strange land, a little like Henry James's Isabel Archer), but hey, she's the Eternal Feminine, loving All Men, and None.
SPOILERS: As for the ending, it's tragedy (remember The Iliad, where Patrocles borrows Achilles' armour?), and the viewer just has to accept the element of contrivance. It's not supposed to be a surprise; we're supposed to guess, and dread, what's going to happen before the characters do, so that we watch the tragedy unfold with awful inevitablity. And if we haven't gotten to know the character who dies well enough to feel any emotion over the ending, he's the Romantic Hero, rash and reckless, and his death is significant because of what he represents.
But these are the problems: I intellectually understand what Renoir's characters are supposed to represent, and the archetypal significance their actions and fates are supposed to have. But maybe because they're archetypes rather than individuals, I can't feel anything for them. The movie has a beautiful design, but it just doesn't have any emotional immediacy for me (unlike contemporary Hollywood masterpieces). The plot is very similar to one of my favourite novels, "The Portrait of a Lady," but I'm drawn into that novel because the novel focuses on the heroine ("The Rules of the Game" is divided between the characters, a filmmaking style many defend for vaguely political reasons but which, in my opinion, diffuses emotion) and she is a complex, fascinating character, not a nebulous archetype. And I have to admit I'm fairly annoyed at the chauvinistic portrayal of women in so many "masterpieces" of European film (Fellini is another culprit): here we have the pert, sluttish maid, her fickle tease of a mistress, and her husband's clinging, irrational, hysterical ex-mistress. Unlike great European filmmakers like Ophuls and Dreyer, Renoir doesn't make even the slightest attempt to get inside the heads of his female characters: he doesn't necessarily judge them harshly, but he always perceives them from the outside.
After 3 viewings, this movie has gotten better for me, so I'm not giving up, and maybe one day it will make an emotional impact on me. Until then, however, I'm on the outside of this movie, too: I can understand why it's supposed to be great, but I just don't care about it.
SPOILERS: As for the ending, it's tragedy (remember The Iliad, where Patrocles borrows Achilles' armour?), and the viewer just has to accept the element of contrivance. It's not supposed to be a surprise; we're supposed to guess, and dread, what's going to happen before the characters do, so that we watch the tragedy unfold with awful inevitablity. And if we haven't gotten to know the character who dies well enough to feel any emotion over the ending, he's the Romantic Hero, rash and reckless, and his death is significant because of what he represents.
But these are the problems: I intellectually understand what Renoir's characters are supposed to represent, and the archetypal significance their actions and fates are supposed to have. But maybe because they're archetypes rather than individuals, I can't feel anything for them. The movie has a beautiful design, but it just doesn't have any emotional immediacy for me (unlike contemporary Hollywood masterpieces). The plot is very similar to one of my favourite novels, "The Portrait of a Lady," but I'm drawn into that novel because the novel focuses on the heroine ("The Rules of the Game" is divided between the characters, a filmmaking style many defend for vaguely political reasons but which, in my opinion, diffuses emotion) and she is a complex, fascinating character, not a nebulous archetype. And I have to admit I'm fairly annoyed at the chauvinistic portrayal of women in so many "masterpieces" of European film (Fellini is another culprit): here we have the pert, sluttish maid, her fickle tease of a mistress, and her husband's clinging, irrational, hysterical ex-mistress. Unlike great European filmmakers like Ophuls and Dreyer, Renoir doesn't make even the slightest attempt to get inside the heads of his female characters: he doesn't necessarily judge them harshly, but he always perceives them from the outside.
After 3 viewings, this movie has gotten better for me, so I'm not giving up, and maybe one day it will make an emotional impact on me. Until then, however, I'm on the outside of this movie, too: I can understand why it's supposed to be great, but I just don't care about it.