Partie de campagne (1936)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

By the mid-1930s, Jean Renoir's interest in the problems of the proletariat had led him to become actively involved in leftwing politics. After contributing to the Communist propaganda piece La Vie est à nous (1936), Renoir made his most overtly political film, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), which was released just a few months before the Front Populaire came to power, bringing with it significant improvements in workers' rights (notably paid holidays).  It was in this all-too brief period of national optimism that Renoir embarked on one of his sunniest films, one that reflects the euphoria of the moment but - somewhat prophetically - leaves a sour aftertaste.  Partie de campagne is a hymn to the transience of love, but it also serves a metaphor for the futility of human aspirations, and it was not long after the film was shot that the idealism of the Front Populaire was completely decimated by the wider political realities of the time.

When it is seen today, Partie de campagne (a.k.a. A Day in the Country) appears to be a flawless piece of cinema, the most perfect distillation of Renoir's art, despite its brevity (it runs to just under 40 minutes).  But of all Renoir's films it is the one that had the most troubled history, and if it had been left to Renoir it would most probably never have seen the light of day.  Originally, Renoir conceived it as one half of an anthology film consisting of two fifty-minute adaptations of stories by Guy de Maupassant, who was incidentally a friend of his father, the painter Auguste Renoir.  As it happened, an appalling spell of bad weather in the summer of 1936 brought massive delays to the location filming of Partie de campagne, causing an eight-day shoot to be extended to almost seven weeks and the film to go massively over-budget.  The cast were so frustrated by the endless delays that they ended up hating each other, and murder was in the air when Renoir turned up one day to announce that he was abandoning the film so that he could start work on Les Bas-fonds.

With Renoir otherwise engaged, the two studio interior scenes set in Dufour's shop (providing the prologue and pre-epilogue) were never filmed, leaving producer Pierre Braunberger with an incomplete and potentially unmarketable film.  Determined to salvage something from it, Braunberger commissioned Jacques Prévert to write an original script that included as much of Renoir's footage for the aborted Partie de campagne as possible.  Prévert's script radically changed the plot and tone of Renoir's film, turning it into a tragicomedy in which the focus was shifted from Henriette to her father, now recast as a capitalist villain.  Renoir had disliked working with Prévert on Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and so refused to direct the film, which was soon shelved.

After the war, Braunberger again sought to release the film, at a time when Renoir's pre-WWII films were experiencing a highly favourable reappraisal.  Renoir was still in America and had absolutely no interest in the project, so this final attempt to resurrect Partie de campagne was left to his former editor Marguerite Renoir.  The latter's earlier edit of the film had been destroyed by the Germans, but the negatives had been preserved by the Cinématèque française.  Two inter-titles were added to replace the missing scenes and Joseph Kosma provided a suitably lyrical score, which included a haunting wordless song performed by Germaine Montero.  When the film was first screened at the Festival de Cannes in September 1946, it met with a lukewarm reception, but the critical reaction on its first public release was more enthusiastic and it was hailed as one of Renoir's finest films.

Partie de campagne serves as a prelude to Renoir's subsequent class-conscious masterpieces, La Grande illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939).  In many of his films, Renoir portrays class as an impenetrable barrier to human happiness and fulfilment, and seems to regard this as one of the great tragedies of modern life.  Although it is much lighter in tone than Maupassant's original story, and portrays all of the characters in a more sympathetic light, Renoir's Partie de campagne still retains something of Maupassant's contempt for bourgeois etiquette, albeit with a more humane and forgiving edge.  The final sequence of the film, in which Henriette meets Henri for the last time and realises what her middleclass propriety has cost her, contains the most bitterly poignant moment of any Renoir film.

The fact that the entire film was shot on location (on the banks of the Loing and Essonne, tributaries of the Seine near Montigny, just outside Paris) gives it a unique character which is so intensely evocative of the impressionistic paintings of the director's father.  The film's most celebrated sequence, in which Henriette plays on a swing, is an obvious reference to Auguste Renoir's famous painting La Balançoire and Claude Renoir's sunny photography is suffused throughout with the dazzling vitality of the impressionists' work.  The bucolic setting is dominated by the river, the river that gives Henriette her freedom, her one brief moment of fulfilment, and then cruelly snatches it away from her.  In some memorable long tracking shots, the river takes on a character of its own, and the film follows its slowly undulating rhythm, matching its ever-changing moods beneath a capricious summer sky.

Jean Renoir's use of the camera is particularly noteworthy in two sequences.  The first is the one in the inn near the start of the film, when Rodolphe and Henri push open the window shutters and the focus moves instantly from them to the countryside in the background.  Renoir could never have achieved the same effect with a simple cut - the spectator is instantly propelled into the idyllic landscape in which the rest of the film is contained.  Then comes the stunning sequence which shows Henriette (Sylvia Bataille at her most radiant) amusing herself on her swing.  As the camera moves with her, with the background somersaulting giddily around her, we cannot help but share her sense of exhilaration, her joyful release from the constraints of bourgeois respectability.

As was frequently the case in his early films, the tight budget obliged Renoir to employ his friends in place of professional actors.  He himself makes a fleeting appearance as the inn owner, along with his 14-year-old son Alain and companion Marguerite Renoir (née Houllé), who edited most of his films from 1931 onwards.  Sylvia Bataille's husband, the noted philosopher Georges Bataille, has a walk-on part as a student priest, accompanied by Jacques Becker, Renoir's first assistant, and the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.  Two other names to conjure with are Yves Allègret and Luchino Visconti, who worked as assistants on the film, shooting sequences when Renoir was away preparing his next film.

A work of exquisite charm and touching lyricism, Partie de campagne is easily one of the most captivating of Jean Renoir's films, and it hardly deserves the unfortunate epithet 'unfinished' that is casually attached to it.  The film's brevity gives it a focus and intensity that is rare in cinema and serves to emphasise the most essential aspect of its story, which is the tragically ephemeral nature of love and life.  The film resounds with those qualities that made Renoir such a great poet and filmmaker - his humanity, his love of nature and his understanding of human frailty - whilst at the same time encapsulating everything about his art and philosophy for life.  Far from being unfinished, Partie de campagne is among the most complete, most perfect poems cinema has ever given us.

Film Synopsis

In the summer of 1860, Monsieur Dufour, a successful Parisian shopkeeper, decides to spend a day in the country, in the company of his mother-in-law, his wife Juliette, his daughter Henriette and his future son-in-law Anatole.  They arrive at an inn where they meet two young men, Rodolphe and Henri.  Whilst Dufour and Alphonse occupy themselves with their fishing on the banks of the Seine, the ladies amuse themselves by flirting with their handsome admirers.  Rodolphe contents himself with the older Juliette, allowing his friend Henri to make an easy conquest of the innocent Henriette...