PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE
A film by Jean Renoir

Finally released in 1946, ten years after it was shot, Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne was hailed as an unfinished masterpiece. Since then, his masterly adaptation of a Maupassant story has grown in reputation to the point where it has become Renoir’s best-loved film.

On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl leaves her family and fianc for a while, and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. Shot on location on the banks of two small tributaries of the Seine, – and to the river has seldom been surpassed.

In a bitter-sweet lyricism, its tenderness and poetic feel for nature, its tolerant satire of bourgeois conventions and its poignant sense of the transience of innocence and love, Partie de champagne seems to distil the essence of all that is most personal to Renoir’s art.

DVD extras include commentary by film historian Philip Kemp, a director’s biography and extra material from the Cinmathque Franaise (discarded takes and screen tests)

France | 1936 | black & white | French language with English subtitles | 39 minutes + 42 minutes extra material | Academy Ratio 1.33:1 | Region 2 DVD

Review

‘This lyrical tragedy rates with Renoir’s greatest… visually it recaptures the impressionist period.’ –Pauline Kael

‘Witty and sensuous, it’s pure magic.’ –Geoff Andrew