Product Details

• Actors: Sylvia Bataille
• Directors: Jean Renoir
• Format: Black & White, Subtitled
• Subtitles: English
• Run Time: 40.0 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000BCZCY6
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #332,068 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love found and lost in the French countryside, April 1, 2006

By 

Bomojaz (South Central PA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Day in the Country (VHS Tape)

***** for the movie / ** for the VHS print

Jean Renoir directed this adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant short story. A Parisian family comes to the countryside for a picnic, and the daughter (Sylvia Bataille) is seduced by a young man (George Darnoux). They go their separate ways, but carry their love for each other with them. Years later, Bataille and Darnoux meet again at the same idyllic spot, and we see the tragedy of "love's labours lost" as Bataille is now unhappily married to another. The photography is exquisite (see below regarding print quality, however) and captures the mood of the lovers: the pre-seduction picnic scenes are sunny and bright; afterward they become dark and gloomy. Only 40 minutes long, Renoir hoped to flesh out the missing middle section of the story (the years that the lovers are apart), but couldn't decide how to proceed and shut down production. The VHS print of the movie I saw was not very good: it was grainy and scratched and the subtitles hard to read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Woman Behind the Man, June 27, 2009

By 

Liam Wilshire (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Day in the Country ( Partie de campagne ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ] (DVD)

PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE, clocking in at just under 40 minutes, is regarded as one of Jean Renoir's best films. And rightly so.

But the history of its creation raises intriguing questions about the notion of authorship in film. With a shooting schedule allotted at eight days, it was supposed to be a "quickie" undertaken between THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE and THE LOWER DEPTHS. It was to be shot on a location well-known to Renoir, the Loing River, where the Renoir family had owned land going back to his father, Auguste Renoir. What could go wrong? Answer: the Summer of 1936.

Miserable weather made shooting all but impossible, and the story and schedule underwent changes to adapt to these problems. Eight days stretched into three months. The atmosphere among the cast, according to Sylvia Bataille ("Henriette"), "became poisonous." Ultimately Renoir abandoned the film, unfinished. He had commitments to other projects. Then, the war came.

Ten years later, Marguerite Renoir, Jean's common-law wife and frequent editor, tracked down the available footage, added titles to substitute for missing scenes, commissioned a lilting score (Jean generally avoided scoring his films), and fashioned the wreckage of the disaster into one of the most pleasant, graceful, and ostensibly effortless films ever made.

It is a film built out of transient, lyrical moments, and those individual moments are pure Jean Renoir. But the fact remains, he could not see a way of completing the film, and Marguerite looked at it and said, "There is a complete film, here." And she was right.

Throughout the history of the arts, women have had to force their way into a man's world. In the classic era of Hollywood, there was only Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, and they were limited to directing low budget genre films.

How many of Rubens' paintings had women toiling away in his workshop? How much did Scott Fitzgerald's work owe to the revisions, or possibly original work, of Zelda? Where would Disney's animated work between the 1920's and the 1950's be without the all-female sweatshops that drew the individual cells?

What would Hitchcock's films--so dependent on pre-production and unyielding execution--be without Alma Reville Hitchcock as story consultant and continuity "girl"?

PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE affects me deeply every time I see it. It is without any doubt one of Renoir's masterpieces. The only question is, "Which Renoir?"

[Note: until this Region 2 DVD becomes available in Region 1, you're likely only to see it "used" on this site. However, Amazon.co.uk has it available for a low price. Even with the currency exchange and overseas shipping, it may be cheaper than those offered here. It was for me.]