Partie De Campagne (Une)

What could be more idyllic than a day in the countryside? Cherry trees, boating, a lovely picnic, a ride on the swings, a beautiful innocent romantic from the city, two charming gentlemen...

In real-life, as opposed to much cinema, meaning isn't always signposted; it is often revealed in seemingly trivial, off-hand comments and brief gestures. So it is in Partie De Campagne. We are whirled effortlessly through a naturalistic world where everything is frothily jolly on the surface, but we find that we have been made aware of the more fraught world of the playing out of human motivations.

Henrietta does her best to maintain her romantic faith, but we who know of her lover's sexual pragmatism, who have looked up her skirt (or imagined we have), who have been voyeurs to her affair, know that reality will intrude. On the banks of the river, she may have been distracted from her own seduction, rapt by the nightingale's beautiful mating call, but we were paying due attention to the taciturn boatman's insistently physical advances.

This is Renoir expertly using visual shorthand to create a sense of lyrical natural beauty, and simultaneously layering it with a direct but subtle irony, all the while maintaining a jaunty pace. It adds up to forty minutes of meaningful, magical, and ultimately poignant cinema. Technically innovative but never frivolously so, Partie De Campagne is fresh and exciting even 75 years since it was made.

It's a push to say the film is finished, but it does work as a self-contained piece, although the narrative leap to the final scene is rather large. As good as the piece is, as a purchase a full price DVD for an unfinished forty minute film is too much.

"Une Partie de Campagne" has been described as the greatest movie ever not finished, but Renoir's 1936 masterpiece feels "almost" finished. Drawing on a simple Maupassant story, it follows a Parisian family to the country for a picnic; during the afternoon, as the fat domineering father and the idiot son-in-law sleep off their lunch and then cack-handedly try their luck at fishing, the wife and daughter go off with two local lads on the make. The daughter is seduced; we're never sure of the wife. In a tailpiece, we see the local lad going back to the same spot, meeting the girl again with her scrofulous husband. Despite the casual nature of their encounter, neither of them has ever forgotten it, and both have always wondered what might have been.... The cut to this is abrupt, which is where the "unfinished" bit comes in, but it's also hard to see what more Renoir needed to say. There are various theories about this; one is that this was intended as part of a portmanteau movie of Maupassant stories, another is that bad weather stopped filming. The DVD extras do nothing to enlighten us.

Though on one level a very well scripted "slice of life", there is something magical about the movie, and when you get to the abrupt ending, it feels like being woken up in the middle of a dream. The opening explores the relationships between the members of the family, the attitudes of the country folk to the city folk, the naivety of the city folk about the country, the willingness of the country folk to exploit this. The camera is almost static, the emphasis on dialogue.

Then the women decide to go on the swings, and something extraordinary happens. They become delirious with happiness, and the camera does too, plunging and soaring, cutting to shots of the birds and the trees. The sequence seems to last for an eternity, but you never want it to end. Sylvia Bataille as the daughter Henriette sustains it remarkably.

This is the moment when Nature takes its course, Henriette shows her stocking tops, and lust - or love as it turns out - can find a way against the idyllic backdrop of the river. All Renoir's natural paganism is expressed in pure poetry.

However, I give this only 3 stars for the shoddy package that the British Film Institute has issued. A full-price DVD for a 40-minute film is pushing it, and at the very least I would expect some significant and informative extras. But the out-takes and screen-tests are a jumble, there is little in the way of commentary, the biography of the director is perfunctory, and I have seen better prints of the movie in the cinema. This presentation is unworthy of Renoir and the film, and is a typical example of the crass commercialism which has overtaken the BFI.

The 10-Disk box set "BFI 75" might be a better way to get hold of this, although that too is marred by some strange choices for supposedly classic movies (The Innocents? Francois Ozon offcuts?)

In an ideal world someone would release this as a double with Renoir's later (1959) masterpiece, "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe".

Partie de campagne encapsulates the spirit of Renoir in a brief span (40 minutes) where his full-length features also have the same romantic impulse at heart, but with a more complex backdrop. You imagine that he has considerably softened the source text by Maupassant, who never wrote anything quite as lyrical as this, as far as I know. I'm sure he would have emphasised the doomed aspect of the story, and the trap that lower middle-class life was at this period, and such a warm portrait of the mother seems to come from Renoir too - in fact it is the character played by Renoir himself who particularly draws our attention to her charms, even though he has his hands full with a tarragon omelette ... The romance is touchingly played out, wrongfooting us in a way that suggests the working of fate in a moving way. The scene on the riverbank is quite superb, with the distraction of the nightingale adding a lot of subtlety in terms of Henriette's reactions to Henri - he really is quite forceful in pressing himself on her, even though her flinging her arms round him a moment later makes clear that her real desire is to kiss him. But it's certainly a sequence of some ambiguity and depth, especially after his initial reluctance even to make contact with the family. The river is wonderfully filmed - straight after this scene we see rain on the water from a boat, a totally arresting sequence of shots set to the yearning strains of Kozma's score, which sounds a little like Saint-Saens. The main actor, by pleasing coincidence, is also called Georges Saint-Saens - could this name have meant he was fated to be in a film so bursting with Romantic melody? There is also a liberal seasoning of comedy, with a delightful subplot involving the mother, and it is something that has a feeling of permanence as a cultural artefact, even though the ending is surely not as Renoir would have wished.