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Writer/director Jean Renoir
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Jean Renoir with Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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Jean comme chasseur, 1910
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Jean Renoir, 1911
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| La Balançoire,1876 |
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Renoir on the set with Sylvia Bataille
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Renoir in front of his childhood portrait
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A DAY IN THE COUNTRY (Partie de Campagne) A France (40 mi)
1946 d: Jean Renoir
Nature has not yet
revealed all her secrets. —Monsieur
Dufour (André Gabriello)
Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir rarely spent time with
his second son, Jean, and when he did, he demanded to be called patron, “the boss.” Parenting was left to the family’s nanny, Gabrielle Renard, who
was only sixteen when she moved into the Renoir home in Paris, spending years
with Jean, becoming one of the central influences on his filmmaking career,
providing a critical sensitivity, where his father’s paintings often portrayed
the French aristocratic class in a sentimental light. “She taught me to see the face behind the
mask and the fraud behind the flourishes,” he wrote in his 1974 memoir, My Life and My Films. “She taught me to detest the cliché.” In the decade of the 1930’s Renoir made two
of the greatest humanist masterpieces ever to reach cinema’s hallowed grounds,
THE GRAND ILLUSION (1937) and THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), two class-conscious
exposé’s revealing the ugly truth about the bourgeois aristocracy, capturing a
precise moment in French history before the Nazi occupation, showing a casual indifference
to the coming reality, where Europe has never been the same since. Yet preceding those crowning achievements
comes this small gem of a film, a gentle work of uncommon beauty, evoking the
painterly pastoral of the impressionist age in all its enduring appeal,
initially planned as two 50-minute adaptations of short stories by Guy
de Maupassant, a friend of Renoir’s famous father, one of the seminal
figures of French impressionism, reminding us of one of his comments, “In
landscape painting I like pictures which make me want to wander about inside
them.” That plan never came to fruition,
however, as the initial shoot in the summer of 1936 suffered massive delays due
to bad weather, where a planned 8-day shoot in sunny skies extended to seven
weeks, going heavily over-budget, as it rained constantly, where the crew
mostly played cards and drank wine waiting for the rain to subside, with Renoir
forced to exit the project prematurely, unable to shoot several sequences, both
the prologue, the family departure from Paris, and a pre-epilogue, a visit to
their shop near the end of the story, due to a prior commitment with his next
film, THE LOWER DEPTHS (1936). As a
result, this film chronicling a family Sunday outing with both the mother and
the daughter having amorous encounters with local young men over a single
summer afternoon in 1860 along the banks of the Seine has always remained an
“unfinished” project, as those scenes were never completed. Producer Pierre Braunberger hired poet and screenwriter
Jacques Prévert to salvage what he could, hoping to expand it to feature
length, but he changed the overall tone of the film to something else entirely,
so the project was scrapped. Braunberger
tried again after the war when Renoir was making films in America, this time
turning to his film editor Marguerite Houllé-Renoir, editing most of his films
after 1931, and the director’s lover for many years, eventually taking his
surname, though they were never married.
The initial edit was destroyed by the Nazi’s, who ordered the
destruction of all French films prior to 1937, but the negatives were smuggled
out of the country by Henri Langlois, whose film preservation efforts
founded the Cinémathèque Française. Two intertitles replaced the missing scenes,
with Kosma adding a somewhat cliché’d musical score, and the film’s unfinished
version had an unenthusiastic premiere ten years later at the 1946 Cannes Film
Festival, but its reputation has grown over time. Much lighter in tone than the initial
Maupassant story that offers a scathing rebuke of bourgeois manners, included
in his 1881 edition of La Maison Tellier,
where the testiness between the husband and wife is gone, as she does go off in
a boat with a much younger man and giggles a lot, but it’s not because the
husband and the apprentice have fallen asleep after drinking too much wine, showing
no interest whatsoever in her flirtatious inclinations, it’s because the scheming
boatmen provide a distraction, offering the bumbling Laurel and Hardy duo with some fishing rods to keep them occupied. Despite the overall sunny tone, there is a
dark underside, where the bittersweet ending is especially poignant, the story
of unrequited love, followed by a wasted life, revealing the heart-wrenching
cost of abiding by social convention, as the heroine is complicit in rejecting her
own personal happiness in order to keep the young apprentice in the family
business.
A blend of cruelty and humanity, the film is very much a
family affair, as the cast and crew were family members, friends, or
collaborators working for little or no pay, entirely shot on location along the
Loing and Essonne tributaries of the Seine River just south of Paris, near
Montigny-sur-Loing and the Fontainebleau Forest, where the lighting appears
natural, evoking the same impressionistic characteristics as his father’s
paintings, yet it’s a refined film, commanded by purely instinctive moments of
fleeting happiness, capturing the same essence as the impressionist painters who
moved out of their studios and began painting outdoors (en plein air), rejecting classical theory, and instead sought to
capture the subjective, fleeting sensations created by gazing at nature’s
beauty. It was impossible to shoot along
the Seine where the impressionist painters used to visit in the 19th century
because the endless pastoral landscapes had been replaced by the noise and
expanse of industry and factories.
Assistant directors included Jacques Becker and Luchino Visconti, who
also designed the costumes, while the director’s nephew Claude Renoir assumed
the cinematography duties in only his second film, with noted photographer Henri
Cartier-Bresson working as his assistant, where perhaps the most memorable
shot is an extended tracking shot of the shoreline taken from a boat slowly floating
down the river, providing a hypnotic, you-were-there stillness to the
experience. Monsieur Dufour (André
Gabriello, an overbearing presence with a surprising resemblance to Oliver
Hardy) is a Montmartre shopkeeper borrowing a horse-drawn milkman’s carriage for
a long-desired day in the country to celebrate his wife Madame Dufour’s
birthday (Jane Marken, who started her career in the silent era and ended up
working with Brigitte Bardot in the 50’s), bringing along his near-deaf mother-in-law
(Gabrielle Fontan), who communes with a stray cat she randomly finds, his
daughter Henriette, sensitive and full of romantic ideals (Sylvia Bataille,
wife of noted philosopher Georges Bataille, who appears for a half-second as a
student priest along with Becker and Cartier-Bresson), and the dimwitted apprentice
shop assistant groomed to be her fiancé, Anatole (Paul Temps, bearing a
surprising resemblance to Stan Laurel).
The young boy on the bridge catching a fish is Renoir’s own son Alain,
as they stop at a countryside inn for lunch, deciding to eat on the grass
picnic style near the banks of the river.
The innkeeper is none other than Renoir himself, who makes the sarcastic
remark, “Parisians always eat on the grass,” Day
In The Country, A (1936) -- (Movie Clip) Feed Them To ... YouTube (3:24),
with editor Margeurite Renoir acting as the waitress, encountering two boaters,
the quietly pensive and melancholic Henri (Georges D’Arnoux, aka Saint-Saens),
and the more overtly frivolous Rodolphe, wearing a hair net for his moustache
(Jacques Brunius, aka Borel, artist, critic, and assistant director to Luis
Buñuel on L’ÂGE D’OR), who leeringly spy on the family and immediately plot to
seduce the women, utterly enchanted by the scene of a playfully giddy Henriette
on the swing, Day
In The Country, A (1936) -- (Movie Clip) I'm Sure They' ... YouTube (3:09), a reference to Pierre-Auguste
Renoir’s painting La Balançoire, The Swing (Renoir).
After gorging themselves for hours, with
both men passing out from the wine, the young boaters make their move, offering
to take the ladies up the river in their boats, needing permission from
Monsieur Dufour, who allows the women to go off alone with complete strangers, easily
bribed with fishing poles, with both men looking like complete idiots using
them, catching an old shoe and each other on the hooks, accentuating how
completely out of place bourgeois values are in the countryside. While Maupassant describes in detail only
Henriette and her mother, keeping the natural setting in the background, this is
a quintessential Renoir film, who preferred filming on location, with directly
recorded sound, adding his own unique stamp on the rest of the characters, each
with their own distinct personalities, creating numerous touches of humor and
irony, which are not present in the original, but most essentially he makes
nature a key element, with landscape a predominate presence.
While the film opens and closes with views of the river,
providing a sense of flow linking humans with the natural world, one of the
more tender scenes is between mother and daughter, where the more reserved Henriette
acknowledges feelings of “yearning,” as the sounds of nature have opened up her
eyes to the beauty of the world around her, awakening her desires, perhaps for
the very first time, where “it almost makes you want to cry,” which is a key
element of the film, sensuous and lyrical, suffused with the rhythms of nature,
Partie De Campagne |
Yearning | Jean Renoir YouTube (40 seconds). Henriette represents a youthful sense of joy,
like the longing of young lovers in David Gordon Green’s All the
Real Girls (2003), or the dream of finding an idyllic love in Bresson’s Four
Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur... (1971), with the film
capturing the texture of the times, creating a mosaic of lasting impressions,
where the director takes a personal story and transforms it into a reflection
on the innocence of youth, lost dreams, and missed opportunities. While Madame Dufour enjoys a carefree fling
with Rodolfe, who assumes a Pan-like presence comically chasing her through the
fields in a theatrical farce, play acting the game of love, Henri and Henriette
row to a secluded island cove that he describes as his private office, where
they are greeted by the sound of a nightingale, which brings a poignant tear to
her eye, before actually finding love.
At first fending off his advances, where one senses a lingering
possibility of rape, with storm clouds appearing on the horizon, yet in one
magical moment they kiss, leading to a sexual awakening with mixed emotions, yielding
to a man who believes in “love eternal,” quickly growing embarrassed at the
fleetingness of the moment, both discovering what love brings, with all its
entanglements and complexities, yet she is literally swept off her feet,
stunned by the transformation, as a rainstorm quickly sweeps across the river
with a darkened flurry, apparently washing the sins away. The film jumps ahead in time, with a
titlecard reading “Years passed with Sundays as bleak as Mondays. Anatole married Henriette, and one Sunday…”
the husband and wife return to the island, like a fond memory, but exactly like
Monsieur Dufour before him, Anatole nods off in a slumber, leaving Henriette
devastated by the emptiness of the experience, so she is pleasantly surprised
to see Henri lurking in the tall grass, both profoundly affected by their
earlier encounter, caught in their idealized notion of love, seemingly frozen
in time, discovering how much the nostalgic memory of that day has meant to both
of them, as Henri acknowledges he frequently returns to this spot, where the
overriding sentiment is how the waves of time have inevitably altered their
lives forever, with love no longer playing a part, as Anatole has married into
the family business, while Henriette’s “yearning” has been sacrificed,
steamrolled into submission to make way for the future. It’s one of the most heartbreaking endings
imaginable, where happiness is thwarted by family ambition, as all her youthful
hopes and dreams have become secondary to the moral practicalities of marriage
and social respectability, where the sunny tones and breezy spontaneity of
youth have turned to regret, despair, and alienation, much like the bleak
ending of Jacques Demy’s The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964). Just how unfinished this film may be remains
a contentious issue, as the director himself refused to add or change a single
frame, where it was designed to be a short film, with long summer days and
balmy afternoons by the riverside, exploring whether the short form could be as
dramatically complex and artfully crafted as a feature-length film, with none
other than André Bazin,
arguably France’s most influential film critic, describing it as a “perfectly
finished work,” while German film director Christian Petzold describes it as
“the most important movie in my life,” (Christian
Petzold on A Day In The Country, Summer With ...). Years before Gregg Toland’s infamous Deep focus camera
techniques became a dominant expression in Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE (1940),
Renoir used it to great effect in both THE GRAND ILLUSION (1937) and THE RULES
OF THE GAME (1939), but also here, especially in the early scenes shot from
inside the rural inn, where the camera remains stationary, but a window opens
and light rushes in as we see an exhilarated young woman and her mother
frolicking on a tree swing, where the sudden infusion of life and nature echoes
throughout the film.
