A DAY IN THE COUNTRY (Renoir, 1936 and then 1946)
Criterion Collection, Blu-ray, Release Date February 10, 2015
Review by Christopher S. Long
Jean Renoir's “A Day In The Country”
(“Partie de campagne”, 1936) has its legion of devotees,
finishing in the top 100 in the most recent “Sight & Sound”
critics poll. While it is undeniably beautiful and sometimes
downright breathtaking, I wonder how much the film's support owes to
its unique and tenuous place in the oeuvre of one of cinema's
most-respected masters.
Long before the omnibus film ever
became a thing, Renoir, still in the early stages of his
extraordinary career, concocted the bold plan to mount a short film
with all the care and attention normally lavished on feature films
and with an eye towards eventually teaming it up with two other
shorts for a full-length theatrical release. Logically enough he
decided to adapt a Guy de Maupassant short story for the start of
this project and began shooting in 1936.
Problems mounted quickly during
production, including a national workers' strike and some of the most
torrential summer rain the area had witnessed in years (put to good
use in a gorgeous scene of brewing storm clouds and flooding waters).
The subsequent delays forced Renoir to abandon the film for a prior
obligation (his next movie “The Lower Depths”), leaving his cast
and crew high and dry and the film both unfinished and unedited until
after the war.
By that time Renoir was working in
America and had all but forgotten about his day in the country, but
Marguerite Houlle Renoir (the director's lover through most of the
'30s) and her sister Marinette Cadix edited the footage, and producer
Pierre Braunberger (a Jewish man forced into hiding during the
Occupation) released the film at Cannes and then later to the French
public in 1946. Though accounts have differed over time, Renoir may
well have been unaware of any of these developments until after the
film's release. Supposedly he did not even see the final cut until
1950.
He must have been surprised at how good
this long-abandoned experiment turned out to be. The story, set in
1860, is quite straightforward. M. Dufour (Andre Gabriello), a
Parisian shopkeeper, takes a weekend trip to the countryside for a
picnic with his wife (Jane Marken) and daughter Henriette (Sylvia
Bataille) with the daughter's foppish paramour Anatole (Paul Temps)
in tow. The arrival of the city folk is met with contempt by the
rural locals (“Parisians are like germs!”) but contempt turns
into passion once two amorous young men, Henri (Georges D'Arnoux) and
Rudolphe (Jacques Brunius), get a good long look at the ethereally
beautiful Henriette gliding through the air on a swing.
Ah yes, surely the film's signature
image. With the camera mounted directly to the swing, Bataille's
beatific face becomes the fixed center as the sky and countryside
whirl by in the background, a vertiginous effect that captivates both
the audience and the city girl. She is intoxicated by the sights,
sounds and smells of nature: the placid rippling of the Seine, the
trill of hummingbirds, the redolent plant life spurting along the
river banks. She is primed, then, for seduction by the very grabby
hands of Henri and he takes full advantage of the situation with
nature as a vocal witness to their love, the sky erupting and the
river swelling in the immediate aftermath of their tryst.
The film maintains its sensuous quality
throughout its brief 41-minute run time but its abrupt ending
(partially explained by Renoir's departure) leaves it feeling
somewhat slight, at least to me, and I find Henri's insistent groping
despite repeated brushoffs more troubling than I suspect I am
supposed to.
However, even a truncated finale
contributes to the sense that “A Day In The Country” is a
gossamer creation that has somehow weathered storms and wars and
decades and even abandonment by its creator to survive with all its
luminosity intact. That makes it a particularly precious relic to its
admirers, and the fact that it's difficult even to label it fully as
a Renoir film renders it, in an odd way, one of Renoir's most
important films. That it provides his most obvious effort to address
the works of his father, the legendary impressionist painter
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, only solidifies its place in the canon.
Video:
The film is presented in its original
1.37:1 aspect ratio. This is a very bright sunlit film for the most
part and it can occasionally be difficult rendering such brightness
in a digital transfer. In general, the image detail is sharp with a
strong grainy texture but there are moments when the image gets ever
so slightly washed out. In outdoor scenes you won't always be able to
pick out each blade of grass the way you can on some of the sharpest
high-def transfer, but close-ups look good and the transfer does fine
job of conveying the insistent force of nature in this setting.
Audio:
The linear PCM mono track has more
problems than the image, mostly owing to the film's difficult
production history. The problems aren't significant, just a
hollowness to the audio at times and occasional slight dropoffs.
Overall it's still a solid mix, as good as can be expected from the
source material. Optional English subtitles support the French audio.
Extras:
“A Day In The Country” may not run
long, but that hasn't led Criterion to cut the extras short.
First up is an introduction by Jean
Renoir from 1962 (6 min.) in which he discusses his early plans for
an omnibus film and extols the virtues of plagiarism. Like most
worthwhile directors, he believes the story is not important, only
how it is told.
“The Road to 'A Day In The Country'”
(2014, 214 min.) is an interview with Renoir scholar Christopher
Faulkner who brings an extraordinary amount of expertise and
background information to the table. It's difficult to imagine a
24-minute interview that packs in more valuable information. I wound
up taking a full page of notes but I think it's best to let you enjoy
this on your own. I hope Mr. Faulkner is invited back to Criterion
many times, this is just fantastic.
The disc also includes an excerpt (5
min.) from a 1979 documentary about producer Pierre Braunberger which
isn't too substantive but still of some interest.
In 1962, the Cinemathèque
française was given
four-and-a-half hours of outtakes from the filming of “A Day In The
Country.” A mere 32 years later they produced an edited 89-minute
feature from these unused scenes called “Un tournage a la campagne”
(1994). The excerpts were chosen and edited by Alain Fleischer. That
entire feature has been included here along with a separate
collection of Screen Tests (9 min.) that were also given to the
Cinemathèque, one of
which is a brief snippet of Renoir (who appears briefly in the movie
as an innkeeper) mugging for the camera.
As an accompaniment to this impressive
feature Criterion has also included the piece “Renoir At Work” in
which Christopher Faulkner analyzes some of the outtakes with an
emphasis on undermining the long-standing notion (promulgated by the
Cahiers critics) that Renoir employed a great deal of improvisation.
Faulkner argues that the excerpts provide evidence instead of
meticulous planning at every stage.
The slim foldout insert booklet
includes an essay by film scholar Gilberto Perez.
Film Value:
This modest little film's existence is
unlikely enough; its release in beautiful high-def with a bevy of
extras is a reminder that we live in a unique time for cinephiles.
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