Director Jean Renoir

One of those films that I was always on the outside of – an interested but detached viewer, wondering if my reading of the film was the one that the writer and director intended.

Well, perhaps. I thought it a comic opera plot filmed in prose: “The Marriage of Figaro” meets Brian Rix. Upstairs-downstairs, a country house weekend, an extended hunting scene (WWI with a nod to fears of WWII perhaps?), a milieu where affaires and kissing the housemaid on the stairs are de rigueur – all filmed at breakneck speed. Afterwards I read about the technical innovations: lenses with a deep depth of field for the corridor scenes, extended takes. (Poor innovators: after a few decades, audiences no longer see how groundbreaking they were.) I wasn’t convinced that the film successfully skewered the “rules of the game” cynicism of the upper classes – if that was indeed its aim. What was it about the Marquis collecting clockwork toys – was that a symbol? As I said, it left me unmoved – except for mild amusement at the woodenness of the actress who played Christine.