Some film classics just date worse than others. Renoir's
La Règle du Jeu is routinely and lazily considered by scared critics to be an untouchable masterpiece, while when it's seen through later eyes it's a fairly tame melange of upper and lower class types occasionally intermingling, a few splashes of social critique and some farcical comedy. There's nothing innovatory either, even for 1939. If you want cinema as an artform struggling for recognition, instead of just entertainment, Eisenstein et al. had that covered years before. Ditto having a social message.
There are real virtues, of course: swathes of pithy aphoristic observations ('The terrible thing about this world is that everyone has his reasons'), and the indisputable humanism is satisfyingly complex. But Renoir is also a dilettante and has a go at covering all the bases whilst satisfying none to the full. Hence, the film can too easily be reduced to just poshos trying to work out who they want to have affairs with and whether to be kind to their servants, and therefore dramatically weaker than a good episode of
EastEnders.
6/10
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