Partie de campagne

Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne began in the summer of 1936 as a planned feature, adapted from a Guy de Maupassant short story, and was abandoned unfinished when bad weather, exhaustion and the political pull of the Popular Front broke up the production. Renoir went off to make La Grande Illusion, and the footage sat in a vault. The producer Pierre Braunberger eventually assembled what existed into a forty-minute film and released it in 1946, a decade after the shoot, with two title cards to explain the gaps. By accident, it is one of the most beautiful unfinished films in cinema.

The cast and crew read like a Renoir family portrait. His son Alain Renoir worked as assistant cameraman; Henri Cartier-Bresson and Luchino Visconti were on the production team; Sylvia Bataille, Jane Marken and Georges D'Arnoux played the central trio. Joseph Kosma's score, written for the 1946 release, drapes Brahms and folk melody over the river light. The cinematography is by Claude Renoir, the director's nephew, working in deep shadow and sun-dappled green.

What survives is a sketchbook of the lyrical pastoral mode that French cinema would spend the next forty years circling, from Truffaut to Rohmer to Pialat. It belongs among the foundations of poetic realism, and it was placed in Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll. It also shows, plainly, what Renoir's working method looked like at full intensity: river, picnic, accident of weather, accident of feeling, all caught in roughly the same long afternoon.