One of the nicest things I've been doing during self-isolation is each week watching a film from the @criterionchannl with @evo_dva. So far we've done:

1. Wong Kar Wai - Chunking Express
2. Yasujiro Ozu - An Autumn Afternoon
3. Jean Renoir - The Rules of the Game

The Rules of the Game was last night. Unfortunately didn't take screenshots, so no pics for this thread. It's a film I've seen and loved before, but last night was the deepest connection I've made with it.

The "game" of the title is the complex network of social rules that keep "chaos" at bay—or so we are promised. Of course, if they fully succeeded, there would be no film, and what we actually see are the ways these rules are frayed, barely containing a roiling chaos.

What the film does especially brilliantly is show the co-dependence of this chaos and the rules that protect us from it. It is not as if the chaos existed before the rules that protect us from it. No, the rules brought it into existence, and interact with it in a delicate dance.

Against that backdrop, the film centers around two characters, Christine and Octave. Christine is, in a sense, the source of the breakdown—she is the key figure in the love triangle that sets everything in motion.

Octave, by contrast, is first introduced as a genial, somewhat clownish figure. An old friend of Christine's, his primary role seems to be to smooth over all disruptions, to gently guide people back to the rules when they want to stray.

Interestingly, both Christine and Octave are in some sense "outside" of the rules. Christine is a foreigner (Austrian), and while she has been socialized into the rules, she constantly longs to break free of them. And Octave is, by his own estimation, a "failure" and "parasite."

Why does Octave enforce the rules (if non-coercively)? Because who better than someone those rules have failed to understand them in depth, and to recognize the way that, despite the disappointments of his life, they alone reserve a place for him (as the well-liked jester)?

Just as the order of the rules produces its own disorder, so also it produces these two distinct outsider figures, and it's only right that they reveal those rules' limits. All the "native" characters cling to the rules, as if the chaos would disappear if only it were denied.

The film ends, brilliantly, with just such a scene of denial and deceit in the name of order: do not acknowledge what has happened, and things can return to "normal". The rules of the game are inexorable; they cannot be harmed simply by being broken. Fin.

(In this thread, I've mostly focused on the high-status nobles. A parallel plot occurs among the lower-status servants, intertwining with the first. I have less to say about that, at least right now, though.)