94. A Day In The Country (Une Partie De Campagne) (1936)

Directed By Jean Renoir

Synopsis

A family goes to the countryside to have a picnic. While the men go do some fishing the women take a couple of rowboats and go have some fun with two men from the countryside... unfortunately for one of the women that would be "the one who gets away".

Review

This film had a curse for me. I spent about 1 hour and 30 minutes trying to fix the video so it would play tapes. Fortunately I had two tapes with this film on them, because it took so long to get here after I ordered it from the States that I asked for a replacement seeing as I thought it had been lost in the mail. Eventually I got two tapes. My video decided to destroy the first one, maybe as God's way of putting right the fact that I got a tape for free. The second tape eventually worked after I managed to pry the destroyed tape from the VCR.

This is not all, however. When I was finally able to fast forward through Renoir's La Chienne, previously reviewed here, in order to get to Une Partie De Campagne I noticed that the Kino VHS version of the film has probably never been restored. Not even the sound has been cleaned up. So I can't understand the muffled French... I should be fine with subtitles... bollocks! The first part of the film is so light that often there are white subtitles in completely white backgrounds making it impossible to read! Moral of the story: Get the BFI DVD version! I only had this one anyway because it came as an extra on La Chienne tape...

That saga out of the way it is a wonderful film. It is quite short, little more than half an hour, but that is quite enough to be able to be an effective and engaging film. It's a film about that summer love that lasted one afternoon but has haunted your dreams for the rest of your life, the one you think of when your marriage is going through a rough patch, the one you never knew well enough to see the rot. And it's sad. After the beautiful beggining in happiness sunshine and the countryside you get a cut to a few years later, when the girl has married who she was "supposed" to marry, and the two afternoon lovers meet. And there is a bittersweetness about the whole thing that is perfectly captured here. What is also perfectly captured in this film is the courting between the daughter and her country lover, the tentative moving of hands in different parts of her body, the man's soft insistence until he finally manages to topple her walls. Watch it, buy it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film is based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, who was a friend of Renoir's father Auguste Renoir. Future star directors Jacques Becker and Luchino Visconti worked as Renoir's assistant directors.

Partie de campagne was shot in July, soon after France had elected the Popular Front government, and employers had negotiated the Matignon agreement, providing wage increases, 40-hour weeks, trade union rights, paid holidays and improved social services. The film was not released until 1946, ten years after it was shot. Renoir never finished the filming due to weather problems, but the producer, Pierre Brauenberger, turned the material into a release after World War II.

This YouTube excerpt is much, much better quality than what I saw: