The Rules of the Game

Asked in an interview about her ideal spectator, Rainer quipped: “He has time to kill after a doctor’s appointment and wanders into the moviehouse to see Rules of the Game. He stays to see Journeys from Berlin/1971. He is bowled over. His phone number is…” For this retrospective, we encourage the reverse, wandering over to Lincoln Center to see The Man Who Envied Women, and sticking around to rediscover the Renoir. In this masterful satire of class relations and bourgeois complacency, a married couple are joined by both the husband’s mistress and the wife’s admirer at a weekend hunting party in the countryside; intrigues begin to mount, and the game is afoot. Rules is a particular favorite of Rainer’s, whose work has likewise brought a complex moral imagination to bear upon tales of romantic entanglement.