Rent Le Grand jeu (1934)

Love & Bullets - Le Grand jeu review by Count Otto Black

This extraordinarily intense melodrama, which plays with the idea of personal identity in an unsubtle way by having just about everybody in it running away from something or other, but gets rather more subtle as it progresses, isn't that far off being some sort of masterpiece. Since this is a French rather than an American film, thoroughly disreputable people, especially women, are treated far more sympathetically than they would have been in English-language cinema from that era. This is a film with one villain who's pathetic rather than genuinely evil (also, he bears a distinct resemblance to Mr. Creosote from "The Meaning Of LIfe"), and absolutely no true heroes. In the end, everyone's out for themselves, and they can't let that personal agenda go. The best of them try harder than the rest, but in the end, they're all just flawed, selfish human beings. And very few of us could claim to be anything else.

Compared to Hollywood cinema of the time, it's extraordinarily frank in its depiction of what exactly it is men want from women, and other aspects of the lives of both sexes, and it doesn't really attempt to excuse any of it. It also manages the rare trick of being technically a war movie, but never once showing any actual warfare, presumably for budget reasons. Essentially it's about the tedium of those very long periods most soldiers experience between wars, and the things they get up to in order to make life interesting, focusing on one particularly intense soldier and what he does to relieve his boredom, and resolve certain issues he already has.

On the plus side, it does this very well, and there's never a dull moment. Unfortunately, certain typical features of this type of film are over-emphasized, notably the peculiar trope that anyone who believes they can tell fortunes is automatically 100% correct, and certain overly convenient aspects of Fate that exist to neatly tie up the plot. And despite its very honest depiction of human nature, our hero isn't a very good actor, especially when it comes to his numerous drunk scenes, and his leading lady is frequently borderline catatonic. Some of the supporting cast were so much better, and played much more intriguing characters, that I sometimes wished the film was about them instead. So I'd sum it up as flawed but interesting.