The 1930s was a decade of political instability in Europe, culminating in the continent going to war just twenty years after the last great conflict had ended. While there is no shortage of films dealing with social and political unrest made post-World War II (such as this year’s The Childhood Of A Leader) only a handful were brave or perceptive enough to depict it at the time. Perhaps the finest and best known of these is Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu.

Released in 1939, it was initially greeted with hostile reviews and unenthusiastic audiences, even being labelled “unpatriotic” by one critic. While Renoir’s previous film La Grande Illusion (1937) was hailed as a masterpiece upon its release, La Règle du Jeu’s current reputation as one of the greatest films of all time only emerged through its rediscovery and the reconstruction of the original cut (almost half an hour longer). The restored version was screened at the 1959 Venice Film Festival and hailed as a masterwork.

Directed, co-written by, and starring Renoir, the fast-paced, superficially lighthearted drama revolves around the private lives of the French bourgeoisie. André Jurieux (Roland Toutain) is a famous aviator who has just landed back in France after a record-breaking flight. He and his friend Octave (played movingly by Renoir) drive to visit Christine (Nora Gregor), the beautiful Austrian woman André loves, and her slimy husband Robert, Marquis de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio). They gather in their country mansion for a lavish weekend retreat where Robert and Christine’s high society friends engage in various bourgeois activities. The most notable of these are the iconic scenes of the hunting party and masquerade ball. All the while, romantic and social tensions unfold and the exaggerated civil congeniality among the guests gradually erodes.

Banned by the French government for two decades for being demoralising, Renoir’s cutting satire of the upper-middle class wonderfully exposes the hypocrisy and malaise of French society on the brink of war in a manner that is humorous, but ultimately tragic.