Everyone Has Their Reasons

A rich Parisian couple invite friends and staff to a country estate for a shooting weekend, and Renoir lets upstairs and downstairs run the same plot at the same time: two households, two sets of affairs, one set of rules that nobody can follow and everybody enforces. The camera moves constantly through rooms in deep focus so several conversations stay legible at once, a technique that looks effortless and took the industry twenty years to absorb. At the centre is the hunt, in which beaters drive rabbits and pheasants toward guests who shoot everything that moves, cut with a precision that makes the social comedy retrospectively unbearable. Renoir plays Octave himself, the friend everyone tolerates, which puts the film's most compromised character in the director's own body.