A Day in the Country may be best known as Jean Renoir’s unfinished masterpiece; however there is plenty in the 41 minutes that we do have to constitute a complete work. A bourgeoisie family takes a day trip from Paris. The men hope to do some fishing while the women just want to appreciate this bucolic idyll. They stop at a restaurant, attracting the attention of two young men who live there. While the buffoonish patriarch and the foppish young man engaged to marry his daughter are off trying to hook fish, the two locals swoop in for a game of seduction with the girl and her mother. What begins as an innocent day by the river will likely mark the girl and her new lover for the rest of their lives.
Adapted from a short story by Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country packs a lot of emotion into its slim runtime ranging from nostalgia to sorrow. Director Jean Renoir began production in 1936 during a turning point in his career as his two masterpieces, Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, were only a year or two away. While many of the director’s films gave voice to the working class, A Day in the Country instead feels like an homage to the pastoral paintings of his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in its riverside nirvanas and burgeoning moments of sexual awakening.
Either way, this gentle tale breaks away from the more serious and political work that engaged Renoir during the first half of his career. A member of the Popular Front, Renoir toiled to reflect the moment’s left-wing politics in many of his films, including The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936). In adapting de Maupassant’s story, Renoir takes the viewer to a different epoch, the French countryside circa 1860. The film’s focal point is Henriette (Sylvia Bataille), the young woman on the cusp of sexual maturity. She attracts the attention of two local men, the mischievous Rodolphe (Jacques B. Brunius) and the more romantic Henri (Georges D’Arnoux), who jockey for her attention.
According to film scholar, the recently deceased Gilberto Perez (who was also my teacher), Henriette is almost the film’s “center of consciousness: we move with her, identify with her, feel with her.” When Rodolphe and Henri first spot Henriette, she is standing on a swing, gently rocking back and forth as the two men stare from out a window. They aren’t only ones who notice as a pair of young seminarians is rebuked by their elders for gawping. Henriette is the embodiment of the beauty of nature and later, when Henri wins her over and takes her boating, she is able to appreciate the grandeur of nature that he, as someone who spent his whole life habituated to the surroundings, cannot. Renoir may send up the upper class by portraying her father and fiancé as a couple of bores, but Henriette and her emotions rule the day in A Day in the Country.
Henri and Henriette eventually consummate their love by the river, but she cannot peel away from her urban life and engagement to another men. Renoir then takes us away from that summer arcadia. He also removes his characters, as a rainstorm takes over. The screen fills with images of nature and that wonderful Sunday suddenly ends. The film then picks up sometime in the future when Henriette and her husband return to the very spot where she and Henri made love. She encounters her old love while her husband sleeps by the river. Both are clearly still marked by that amazing day in the past. But it’s never to be and both of them know, pushing the film away from its rustic opening and into tragedy.
Renoir was called away from A Day in the Country to finish the The Lower Depths and never had the chance to return to it, as he soon relocated to the United States. Never intended to be a feature length film, what we have today, with the addition of some title cards, is pretty close to what Renoir intended for his finished version. According to Perez, Bataille was poised for stardom had this film been released and that she never forgave him for abandoning the project. Like her character, she was likely haunted for the rest of her life by what could have been.