A Day in the Country (“Partie de Campagne”) Director: Jean Renoir (1936)
“Did you feel an immense tenderness for it all… for the grass, the water, the trees? A vague sort of yearning. It starts here, then it rises. It almost makes me want to cry.”
★★★★★
Initially adapted from a short story by Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country is a personal favorite of mine by foundational French director Jean Renoir, the second son of the famous French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This is a beautiful and bittersweet trage-comic romance with a fairly simple aesthetic filled with memorable scenes of nostalgia and for a love long lost, as we leave the city of Paris for the quieter natural beauty of a peaceful pastoral scene.
A Day in the Country remains an unfinished masterpiece. It is a simple story about a shop-owner from Paris who takes his family on a trip to the French countryside one afternoon in 1860 to celebrate their mother’s birthday. The film opens with a young boy fishing off a bridge into the river Seine in the French countryside. This boy is Jean Renoir’s 14 year-old son. Behind him a carriage pulls up and stops for lunch at a rural French restaurant (the owner of the restaurant was played by Jean Renoir). Upon stopping their journey, the family gaily relaxes from their travels among the trees, and the shop-owner’s daughter, Henriette, plays happily on a swing with her mother. Traveling with them is Anatole, who is engaged to Henriette. He is an incapable and bumbling sort of young man.
Two young men who are boaters become interested in the two women, Henriette and her mother. They devise a scheme to distract both men so they can spend time with both mother and daughter. They give fishing poles to Anatole and the shopkeeper, and they comically pretend to fish in the river, while both young men take the women lazily in boats down the river. One of the men, Henri, takes Henriette to a secluded spot along the river in the trees and advances upon her. She initially refuses, but eventually gives in, and says her father would disapprove. Scenes of rain on the Seine depict the passing of years, an important and unplanned scene due to unpredictable weather.
Years later, Henriette finds herself returned to the same spot. She is now married to Anatole, her incompetent husband. While Anatole takes a nap, Henriette walks along the river to find Henri, the man who seduced her years earlier. Together, they recount their time together, but when Anatole awakes, Henriette returns to him. Henri lights up a cigarette and hides in the trees as the married couple gets back into their boat and continues to float away down the river.
A Day in the Country was never finished due to inclement weather. It wasn’t until years later in 1946 that producer Pierre Braunberger released the film. The film was made at the height of the French Popular Front period, a radical left and communist government that overtook France shortly before the Nazi occupation. Renoir, himself, was a communist and later left France during the Nazi occupation. When the film was finally released to the public by Braunberger in 1946, Renoir was still living in exile in the United States.
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Credits
- Directed by: Jean Renoir
- Screenplay by: Jean Renoir
- Based on: “Une partie de campagne” by Guy de Maupassant
- Produced by: Pierre Braunberger
- Starring:
- Sylvia Bataille…..Henriette Dufour
- Georges D’Arnoux (credited as Georges Saint-Saens)…..Henri
- Jane Marken (credited as Jeanne Marken)…..Madame Dufour
- André Gabriello…..Monsieur Dufour
- Cinematography: Claude Renoir
- Edited by: Marinette Cadix and Marguerite Renoir
- Music by: Joseph Kosma
- Production Company: Panthéon Productions