There are so many completed films with incredible budgets, long detailed scripts, that spent years in the editing booth, that were released in 3-hour-plus director's cuts, and there's not even half as good as this unfinished, 40 minutes classic.
Unlike El Sur, I find the incomplete nature of this film to be a detriment. Its shift from comedy to tragedy is never developped past the kiss and as such I found the ending rather unsatisfying and rushed. Still, there are a number of beautiful moments leading up to it.
Un petit chef-d'oeuvre inachevé du grand Renoir entre intimisme tranquille et flamboyant impressionnisme qui nous vaut un superbe tableau d'époque... www.cinefiches.com
It's a shame that it's unfinished because what's there is wonderful; a tender poeticism about a subject that is, on paper, duplicitous and lewd. One can really tell it's a Renoir film what with the short-lived authentic love doomed by societal expectations and class circumstances. Glad though I am that it exists, the final scene evokes a weight that isn't quite there in the existing scenes, feeling a bit pretentious.
Based on one of Guy de Maupassant's short stories, I can think of no better homage to the brilliance of the genius wordsmith. An absolute masterpiece that lives up to the adage that the best things *really do* come in small packages. Sublime, beautiful, and touching, all in equal measure.
A mini-masterpiece. It's about desire and love, but it's also about how a place, a landscape, can transform you, how you can lose yourself at times and not understand why. Or maybe in the case of Henriette, she really found herself, the self she wanted to be but that society wouldn't allow. Every moment is perfection.
Almost everything that happens here is contained. Class behaviour, unhappy women, treacherous sexual desire. Nature shivers rhyming with the characters, and it looks as if it's been staged by Renoir. There're bursts of beauty: the swings, some compositions with the boats in the river, Henriette's extreme close-up after the kiss, and of course, the ending, with Georges D'arnoux's gesture meditating with a cigarette.
A nice piece of incidental fluff, that has the feeling of summer day, albeit a pretty forgetful one. Renoir uses his calming, observationally emotional style to show a picnic in the country, and the lax atmosphere of gentle relaxation and smiling downtime fun. It just doesn’t amount to much and is too light and airy to carry enough of anything to be too worth while.
Being incomplete I can't say it deserves the acclaim of Renoir's masterpieces, rather it is an essential part of his oeuvre that demonstrates his ability to capture emotion so naturally. At 40 minutes long I was completely invested in this short but sweet bucolic dalliance.
A Day in the Country is an engaging, beautiful and moving short film from directed by Jean Renoir that exudes a compelling warmth and an incomparable sense of romance. The film does feel a little incomplete - the final transition is quite abrupt, but needed - but Renoir's natural talent to tell a story, his visual flair and his characters with a huge human dimension more than compensate the film's flaws.
"The shepherd prods the black sheep to cast his eyes down again to avoid the sins of the flesh but manages to sneak a glance of his own" marvellous
wonderfully portentous shots of the rain that are simultaneously the culmination of the afternoon's perils--the release of those tensions--and the omen of what's to come
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xjkr30_partie-de-campagne-1936_shortfilms
Depressing to watch, not so much for its subject matter, but for the fact that this is a great film that could had been even better, had Renoir finished it.