Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country) is an artistic miracle while at the same time somewhat of a torso. In Renoir's case it was the external factors, namely unreliable weather, which forced him to end the film project early. But the question is whether or not it would have been improved with another ten minutes. With its forty minutes it actually doesn't feel like a torso at all. The last images are congenial. A kind lamentable coda. It might be a bit truncated perhaps, but still perfectly adequate. The spirited day has reached its end, darkness falls and the weather turns dramatically.
Partie de Campagne is based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, who was a close friend of his father Auguste (the famous painter). It flies on light but melancholic wings. A bourgeois family from Paris is on an outing in the countryside a Sunday in the 1860s. The man, his wife, daughter, grandmother and future son in law (and a cat) are traveling in a horse and carriage. The son in law goes on and on about a fishing rod. They stop at an inn. Here they can eat, rest, angle and perhaps socialize a bit. They're not particularly dressed for leisure, it simply didn't exist at that time, at least not in bourgeois circles as these.
The hosts at the inn, two young men, a woman and an older man (played by Jean Renoir himself), seems friendly. The two sportily dressed men, one of them frivolous and joyful, the other a little more sober, have already decided which of the women to be seduced and by whom. The future son in law, small and slender with excessively baggy pants, continues to rave on about his fishing rod. The man, well fed and puffy, is only interested in wine and food, and to lie in the grass with a reed in his mouth.
Joseph Kosma's melancholic and seductive music embeds the sceneries. It must also be mentioned that two other well-known directors, Jacques Becker and Luchino Visconti (at this time only in the making), were involved in the production, as well as the well-known photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The daughter, Henriette, played by Sylvie Bataille, gets a lot of appreciative glances from the men passing by the picnicking family. Among them are the notorious philosopher Georges Bataille, married to Sylvie Bataille, which is a fitting context for the this libertine thinker who had a lot in common with Marquis de Sade. Desire and the lustful gaze is constantly present in the film, not least in the seductively beautiful scene with Henriette in the swing, a work of art in itself, coupled with the camera's smooth movements and Kosma's seductive music, which obviously makes you associate it with Fragonard's famous rococo painting. And more than one scene brings to mind Manet's famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass).
Sylvie is absolutely wonderful as Henriette, her face is like an open book, full of wonder and lust for life. Anatole, as the future son in law is called, finally gets his fishing rod after an intoxicated nap of snoring in chorus with a variety of natures own signaling systems. Anatole's stubborn hiccups disturb the sleep of the others and drive his wife crazy. She has made a series of desperate attempts to get the snoring man to show an interest in her and fulfill her desires. Tickling him with a reed for example. It's the two young men at the inn who arranged the fishing rods, in order to keep the men of the family occupied and in its turn be able to make a move on the women. The frivolous young man takes the role of a frisky Pan as he's dancing around his willing prey with a flute.
The serious young man does the opposite and move with caution. To him it's not a game or a hunt. He's in for the real love. The clouds pass by during the first kiss, foreshadowing what is to come. Henriette is betrothed to Anatole, who constantly get stuck with his fishing rod in the dense vegetation.
Kosma's music is changing for the darker. Slightly threatening clouds also pass by, while time makes a jump a few years in the future, where the same Sunday routine is repeated. Anatole and Henriette are now married, and she kindly and dutifully has to carry the fishing rods. The lovers steal a few moments together in some nearby bushes, while Anatole sleeps or is busy with his fishing rods. It's late summer and life is not fun and games anymore. The rain-lashed river presents a different, less hospitable face. Time is running out and away.
The impressionist masterpiece that is Partie de Campagne has a beautiful mix of good-natured satire and sweet melancholy, and the excellent camera work alone makes this a desert island film and one of the forgotten pearls of the 1930s, unfinished or not.
— SteemSwede