We really have to blame the aviator on Jean Renoir

Well, to be sure: there was Lindbergh, there was Earhart. But when you think of it - as you do, every time - the first thing to cross your mind as the unfathomable, frequently reflective allure of a gaze fastens on you from a pair of these things is, rather, of an impromptu, imponderable height which the wearer occupies in your regard. And why should this be, but for the panache of the aviator in two (can you stand it) two of the greatest motion pictures of all time? 

But, rest easy. Where else is it possible to repair, to any discussion of La Grande Illusion (1937) or La Règle du Jeu (1939), without enduring some recital of the latest critical fetish, replete with the sort of slovenly neologisms Orwell deplored in Politics and the English Language? Not for that did you head for this relais, I hope. 

  

Here, now, sip a flute of Billecart, and we'll hear nothing more of the curious cultural history of cinema. These are movies for people who like movies, in the way people who like flying think of it as sport. A gallant pastime, albeit somewhat less attractive down below.

Ah, sport. That weirdly fungible allusion to anything pleasant involving adrenalin and perspiration. Selection, contact, engagement, contest, release, reflection. Ancient cycle. Still goes on, I'm told. We may all think we are discussing, say, tennis, when various percentiles of us are transposing the narrative into the discus, the javelin, or cat burglary, already anticipating getting together later for a second flute. 

And this, too, was central to both films. They pointedly do not hammer one with an insistence upon What this Thing is About, any more than it would be polite to remark on the Champagne as other than pleasant. They exude, moreover, a serenity that Champagne, itself, is not in peril from the Other Side. 

We get the drift, civilisation assimilates the text in its way - so much of La Règle familiar, already, from a play by Beaumarchais which launched the slide of the Bourbons; and of l'Illusion, from pesky Geneva Conventions which don't apply to the Stars and Stripes, much less to any drug-financed goon squad we outsource our morals to, instead - and we reflect on our elevated appreciation of aviators, in this progressive and discerning age of drones.