This played yesterday at the Conference on World Affairs.
Roger Ebert introduces these showings and always gives a nice talk,
so I try to make it every year. This year I missed most of his talk,
but I stayed for the movie since I heard enough to intrigue me and
since I’d never seen a Renoir film.

This film is widely acclaimed as one of the greats of all time,
perhaps second only to Citizen Kane; in fact it pioneered a technique
or two that showed up later in Kane. I think it takes a certain
skill to watch a movie like this, in that you have to be able to
throw yourself back into the time, to understand the state of the art
of moviemaking as it was then, in order to realize the ground broken
by the film.

I’m not always able to do that, and yesterday I definitely wasn’t,
what with the various distractions of life (i.e., why I was late).
Still, even without the special effort I could see why people praise
this movie. The hunting scene was particularly powerful (I closed my
eyes for parts), and then the way it was echoed later, showing the
various characters to be not only carefree, but careless, was a sort
of grim delight.

Lives out of balance, oblivious to what awaits them in the coming
years.