A DAY IN THE COUNTRY (1936)

A.K.A.: Un Partie De Champagne

Country: France

Genre(s): Romance

Director: Jean Renoir

Cast: Sylvia Bataille / Georges D’Arnoux / Jacques B. Brunius

Plot

Accompanying her family on a country picnic, Parisian girl Henriette is seduced by a local man who takes her on a trip down the river in a rowboat.

What I Liked

Despite its understated look and plot, “A Day in the Country” remains an emotionally evocative movie nearly eighty years after it was made.  Brief but poignant, it is the aborted creation of legendary French director Jean Renoir, who apparently stopped production on the film after experiencing some sort of creative block.  He left the film incomplete and it was not released for a decade, with minimal title cards to help make the plot more understandable.  What Renoir did put on film stands well on its own, even in truncated form, as truthful and emotional filmmaking.  The film tells the story of a city family’s day trip out into the country to fish and picnic and two young locals who try to seduce the female tourists.  From this simplicity Renoir calls forth wonderful feelings of sentimentality and light-heartedness, and, later on, remorse and longing.  Some of that emotion is generated through some fascinating technical work, particularly as Henriette rides a swing and enjoys the carefree beauty of her surroundings.  The camera swings through the air with her, capturing her weightless joy.  Today such shots are common, but it must have been very difficult with the hulking mechanisms that passed for motion picture cameras in the 1930s.

What I Didn’t Like

While everyone in the family are portrayed as ignorant, naïve tourists bumbling their way through a vacation, the father and his future son-in-law are made particularly idiotic as the film’s comic relief.  The father is a false know-it-all, trying to impress everyone with his pretended outdoorsmanship.  The future son-in-law is his spineless, man-child sidekick, one of the most annoying buffoons I can remember seeing in a movie.  The attempt at a Laurel and Hardy dynamic fails.  Neither character is interesting, funny, or entertaining.  Ironically, the boringness of one of the characters becomes a source of the tragedy to be found later in the film.

Most Memorable Scene

*spoiler alert*

While the majority of the film is light-hearted, almost whimsical, the film’s last moments remind us that one day cannot last a lifetime, as much as we might sometimes wish it to do so.  The title cards take care of a leap forward in years where we find that young Henriette has again travelled to the scene of her youthful, romantic memories.  She has since married the young buffoon, who has come with her only to take a nap and leave her alone.  When she encounters the same man with whom she had shared such a wonderful afternoon so long ago, the hearts of both characters endure the torture of a last, longing conversation.  Suddenly the film becomes about as heartbreaking as any movie can be, Henriette’s tears at her inability to escape her fate and the man’s obvious longing to return to that moment when they were young serving as a solemn coda that will long linger in the mind of the viewer.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5