Um Dia no Campo

This movie is a beautiful looking one and is like a day in the life of of a family on their summer holiday on the countryside, somewhere in early 20th century France.

The movie is filled with some unexpected contrasts and metaphors. The movie in now way can be called a formulaic one and it picks its own path with its story. This ensures that the story is both realistic as well as unexpected in parts.

The way how the movie ends is in large contrast with the rest of the otherwise happy and cheerful beginning of the movie. It has a summer holiday look and feeling over it, in which the main characters, from the big city, are obviously enjoying the beauty and quietness of the country life. You would expect the love story to unravel as a romantic one but the romantic first encounter really doesn't go as often gets portrayed in movies. I must say that the movie is just like life and it doesn't try to bloom things. But perceptions differ, as can be also seen in the final sequence of the movie, in which the events of that one summer day in the country left a big lasting impression on the girl.

What Jean Renoir does really well is capturing the right mood and atmosphere of the movie. Even though I obviously wasn't around in 1936, it still feels all very familiar and pleasant. Of course the movie gets helped by its country side environments, which gets captured perfectly on camera.

Not all of the actors were real experienced professionals, which can be seen back in their performances but overall this shouldn't trouble you to much, since Jean Renoir perfectly knows to tell the story with its images and character behavior, rather than relying completely on the actor's skills.

I wouldn't go as far as calling this Renoir's best but it's nevertheless a great, humble, realistic, honest, warm portrayal of life.

8/10

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A 40 minute fragment of an unfinished movie which Truffaut describes as a cinematic short story, about a picnic in the country.

Renoir movies are always idyllic visually - like beautiful cinematic paintings, but Partie de Campagne is particularly idyllic. For some reason Renoir really wanted us to feel that we were in the country. This is his most visceral movie: he really takes you into the landscape in a way he does not usually do. Usually we merely sit back and admire it - here we are shown some gorgeous images of rain on the stream from the view of a boat on the water. The bottom half of the frame is virtually in the water we're so close to the action.

My favourite parts of Renoir movies are when he goes out on location (which he did quite a bit) and shoots wonderful scenes in nature. Here we have forty minutes of pure natural beauty (with a group of characters added for colour). I'm not sure that if Renoir continued with this project it would have retained enough interest over a two hour length - most likely its merely the central episode of a movie. Like Kubrick, Renoir made his movies up from several big, beautiful chunks. This applies most to Grand Illusion, so perhaps this sequence would never have been intended to supply enough dramatic interest for an entire story, but for lovers of Renoir, here are some of the most beautiful things he ever filmed. If you've never seen a Renoir film, the first experience is always the best, and it might be spoiling you if you start with this one, but it would be a beautiful introduction to him.

Unfinished,this is a one of Renoir's most remarkable works.As far as Guy DE Maupassant is concerned,only Max OPhuls's "le plaisir"(1951) and Christian-Jaque's "Boule de Suif" (1950)equal it.

This is apparently a very simple story:a couple of bourgeois (Jane Marken and Gabriello) ,their daughter (Sylvia Bataille) and her less-than-handsome husband leave for a day in the country (title).There the young girl meets love ,short-lived happiness.

Beneath the placid surface,tragedy emerges.The beautiful landscape,the simmering water,the whispering grass,the swings which seem to reach for a pure sky,the small fish you savor in the guinguettes down by the river,the thrill of it all!The young girl's longing for true love is harder to endure in such a peaceful paradise.This is one of these rare movies in which you experiment happiness tinged with an infinite sadness.

A whole sequence is missing:a card explains the events which were not filmed.Sylvia Bataille's last line(to the man she fell in love with) will make you cry out:"I've been thinking of it every day".Woman has always been sacrificed in Maupassant's work.At a running time of 40 minutes,a lot of people claim it for Renoir's best though.I do.Claude Renoir marvelously conveys Maupassant's depictions with his pictures.

The family of a Parisian shop-owner (André Gabriello) spends a day in the country. The daughter (Sylvia Bataille) falls in love with a man (Georges D'Arnoux) at the inn, where they spend the day.

This simple film, less than 45 minutes long, is now available thanks to Criterion. Who can say no to Jean Renoir in the 1930s? So many of us are preoccupied with American comedies of the era, we forget that other countries exist. And this one at a time that France was just about to be invaded by Germany!

Although her career spanned over 20 years, this would turn out to be Sylvia Bataille's most memorable role. Renoir never finished filming due to weather problems, but producer Pierre Braunberger turned the material into a release in 1946, ten years after it was shot. Braunberger was right to release the film.

Just how unfinished "Partie De Campagne" truly is remains something of a contentious issue. There are countless differing theories and opinions, some of which seem to have been instigated by the director himself. There are those, this reviewer included, who believe Renoir originally intended this film as one-half of a double feature of Guy De Maupassant adaptations. Whatever might have once been planned, however, does nothing to soften the radiant beauty and brilliance of the film.

Renoir had collected around himself a group of friends and family in the hope of creating what he later described as a "holiday" atmosphere during the scheduled week of filming. In accordance with the story on which it is based, long summer days and balmy afternoons by the river banks were called for in Renoir's script. Unfortunately, the cast and crew were faced with a damp, dismal July which continued long into August. Cramped up in the lobby of the hotel, sheltering from the storms outside, personal tensions and rivalries soon inevitably surfaced. With the months continuing to pass and little to show the financial backers in the rushes, money became scarce. Eventually, after refusing Sylvia Bataille's request for leave so she might audition for a future project in Paris, the director himself nonchalantly announced he would be abandoning the film to concentrate his efforts on his next film, Les Bas-fonds.

Considering all of the above, it is miraculous that the film we see today is such a luminous, sensual masterpiece.

Much is made of Renoir's use of deep focus techniques in films such as Le Regle de Jeu and La Grande Illusion, quite rightly so, but it is also used to great effect in this film. The film's early scenes largely take place inside a rural inn. Renoir keeps the camera mostly in one place, stationary. Then, suddenly, a window is opened; light floods in, we see trees, a breeze blowing lightly through grass, a young woman and her mother arcing high into the summer air on swings. Now we cut to a close-up of the girl, with the camera fixed to the swing, an accomplice to her every movement. She is laughing, ecstatic, exhilarated by her surroundings. It is an exhilarating moment in cinema, the sudden infusion of life and nature into the film echoes in the viewer's mind throughout the short running time.

Renoir is a great film-maker, perhaps the greatest of all, and this is a great film, perhaps his greatest of all.