Everybody has their reasons

“The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.”

I don’t think there’s ever been a more endearing, honest, noble, brutal examination of the nature of love, where it comes from, how it grows, what it makes us feel, what it compels us to do, and the consequences that may come along with it than in the depiction Jean Renoir showed in 1939 with The Rules of the Game, one of the true undisputed masterworks of cinema of all time. I genuinely believe the entire psychology and mysteries of love is contained in just this ONE film. Maybe it takes a few rewatches to really grasp this, and truly get why this film is so unbelievably revered and important, but WHEN it clicks, and with time, believe me, it WILL click, there’s no going back. Everything, every component of the dramas and heartaches of everyday love, this film contains. How one conversation between two people can hold a place in a person’s heart forever and remain nothing but peanuts to the other; The importance of listening, and the desire to not only want to be listened to, but understood in a way no one else could quite understand you; The lengths one will go to fight for their love, the dedications they make and the humiliations they not only create for themselves amongst peers, but drown themselves in, for humiliation and condemnation may not be enough to pressure, cure and glue back together a heart already shattered to pieces - in the case of Andre in the film, who flew oceans for his love, only for it to be returned with silence. In love, The Rules of the Game is with the idea of love, only the most pure and radiant of loves, the loves only true in fairy tales. And yet, on only the most brutal, pessimistic, note does the film end on, trying to show that wanting, wishing, desiring for such a love so pure can only be found in dreams, not reality - not a note that one ever wants to believe, especially those who desire that very fairy-tale love, but those in life looking to find just that seem to suffer the short end of the stick the most. As someone who recently had to endure the very dramas, pains, heartbreaks and humiliations I describe here, more and more true, and even more meaning all that The Rules of the Game has to say, has now, for me, taken on. Each frame of this film says more than a thousand words, and you’re never truly done with it, despite the rolling of the credits. Its completely fresh every time you put it on, and if, bring you do, the brand new heartaches and heartbreaks of your life to your viewing experience, more complete, resolute, resonance will you find from this masterpiece. One of the most perfect, heartbreakingly rich, honest, insightful films ever made.