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The Rules of the Game @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

Webster University/Moore Auditorium
St. Louis, MO

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The Rules of the Game @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

This double bill by one of cinema's true masters, Jean Renoir, co-stars the French countryside. "The Rules of the Game," is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners. Widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, "The Rules of the Game" lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances during a weekend at a marquis' country château. Subjected to cuts after its premiere, the film was reconstructed in 1959 and is presented here in its 2006 restoration.

"There are about a dozen genuine miracles in the history of cinema, and one of them is Jean Renoir's supreme 1939 tragi-comedy 'The Rules of the Game,'" writes Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune. "Renoir's masterpiece -- whose echoes can be seen in films from Ingmar Bergman's 'Smiles of a Summer Night' to Robert Altman's 'Gosford Park' -- is a love roundelay that's also the most complex, astonishingly varied and brilliant of all ensemble comedy-drama films, a tale of frantically crisscrossing amours, set to the music of Mozart, Saint-Saens and Chopin, in a form that switches freely from farce to romance, satire to tragedy."

Shown with:
A Day in the Country/Partie de campagne
Jean Renoir, 1936/1946, 41 min., B&W, new restoration
Based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, "A Day in the County" -- begun in 1936 but not released until 1946 -- is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family's picnic and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men. Time Out London says of "A Day in the Country": "It may be only a featurette, but this masterly adaptation of a Maupassant story is rich in both poetry and thematic content. Witty and sensuous, it's pure magic."

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Diane Carson, professor emeritus of film at St. Louis Community College at Meramec and film critic at KDHX.