The Criterion Collection’s DVD of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, all scrubbed up and fitted out with gazillions of special features, is now available for pre-ordering at amazon.com by clicking here. Do so. Even if you don’t share my passionate belief that it’s the greatest movie ever made, surely you’ll agree that it comes damned close–and if you’ve never seen The Rules of the Game, now’s the time. The street date is Jan. 20.
For some reason, mention of The Rules of the Game put me in mind of the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, whose unfortunate winner, Aniruddha Bahal, was announced last week. Or maybe it was vice versa. The Rules of the Game, after all, is a film about sex (among other things) in which you don’t see anything but people talking and (occasionally) kissing. Yet there’s never any question in your mind about what’s going on behind all those closed doors.
I’m not prudish about on-screen sex: I just don’t think it tends to be especially memorable or persuasive. More often than not, as in the case of Kissing Jessica Stein, it’s far more effective–not to mention sexy–when the details of the act itself are left to the viewer’s imagination. But I readily make an exception for those rare sex scenes that are used to deepen our understanding of the characters. John Sayles is particularly good at this, especially in Baby It’s You and Lone Star, where the sex scenes tell us important things about the participants. Another film in which an on-screen portrayal of sexual intercourse is used to brilliant (and joltingly unsexy) effect is The Dreamlife of Angels. And I hasten to add that I can also think of a few fairly explicit on-screen sex scenes that are just plain arousing, foremost among them the ones in The Big Easy.
Any thoughts on this topic, OGIC?