Main Cast: Sylvia Bataille, Jane Marken , Georges Darnoux, Paul Temps
Release Year: 1946
Country: FR
Run Time: 40 minutes
Plot
Jean Renoir's A Day in the Country is a short and semisweet romantic vignette based on a story by Guy de Maupassant. A group of family members spend a day away from the city in the French countryside. While the men go off to fish, the mother (Jeanne Marken) has a harmless flirtation with a rural "rake," while the daughter (Sylvia Bataille) has a more serious liaison with a handsome young man (George Saint-Saens). Fourteen years later, the same family vacations at the same spot. The handsome stranger returns, hoping to renew his affair with the daughter; unfortunately, the girl is now married to a dull, insensitive jerk. The two former lovers ponder what might have been, then the family heads back to the city. A Day in the Country currently exists only in a 40-minute version; Renoir had planned to film scenes depicting what happened in the years between the two holidays, but he closed down production due to an acute "creative block." For this reason, although the film was shot in 1936, it wasn't released to theaters until ten years later. For its American distribution, Day in the Country was bundled together with two other short European films -- Joifroi and the controversial The Miracle -- as the portmanteau film The Ways of Love. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
An extraordinarily beautiful and compelling film by Jean Renoir, the virtues of A Day In The Country are even more remarkable when one considers that it is an interrupted, unfinished work. The portion that is present sings with thematic and visual lyricism, suffused with the rhythms of nature that abound in its location setting, and also the sensuous tone and content of its story, itself a romantic idyll; and to this, Renoir adds an element of interaction with music that was amazingly sophisticated in a 1936 movie; and it would have been fascinating to have seen how the intended middle section of the movie made use of these elements. Alas, the very setting that was to set the visual tone for this movie also doomed it at the time -- when he started shooting it in July of 1936, Renoir intended A Day In The Country to be a longer, more complex film, but a series of rain storms delayed shooting until he was finally obligated to put the movie aside, unfinished. He moved on to his next project -- La Vie Est a Nous -- and the existing material languished until a decade later, when the producer, Pierre Braunberger, retrieved and released it. The movie still developed a worldwide following, even in this truncated form. Its status was further confirmed when the British Film Institute released a DVD edition in 2007 that contained all manner of supplementary materials, including surviving outtakes and additional footage. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Jacques Brunius - Rodolphe; Henri Cartier-Bresson - Seminary Student; Gabrielle Fontan - La grand'mere; André Gabriello - M. Dufour; Pierre Lestringuez - Un vieux cure; Alain Renoir - Little Boy Fishing; Georges Saint-Saens - Henri; Jean Renoir - Pere Poulain; Marguerite Renoir - Servant
