Things are starting to look good, as far as the release of Jean Renoir's films on English-subtitled DVD are concerned. There has already been the excellent Criterion release of La Grande Illusion (1937), with their release of La Règle du Jeu (1939) forthcoming, although that has been delayed until next year by the discovery in France of new film elements. In addition, La Bête Humaine (1938) has been available in France with optional English subtitles. But most importantly this year the UK has seen the release, firstly, of a superb transfer of Boudu Sauvé des Eaux (Boudu Saved From Drowning)(1932); of the BFI's own version of La Règle du Jeu; and finally, also from the BFI, of a gem of a DVD of Partie de Campagne (1936).

Partie de Campagne, an adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant short story Une Partie de Campagne (set in the 1860's but first published in 1881), is for many the "ideal" Renoir, with the humanity and respect it brings to bear on the central characters (still allowing lesser characters - the father and the fiancé - to be crudely caricatured) combined with its vivid depiction of the natural world. If it lacks the depth and complexity of, say, La Grande Illusion or La Règle du Jeu, Partie de Campagne, even in its unfinished state, is a joy to watch.

As Philip Kemp points out in his very serviceable audio commentary, there has been some debate as to how "unfinished" the forty-odd minutes of Partie de Campagne actually are. Certainly the original intention on Renoir's part was to adapt Maupassant's original short story into a short feature film no longer than sixty minutes, with one of the main impetuses being the opportunity to work again with the 24-year-old Sylvia Bataille (at the time wife of Georges Bataille, future wife of Jacques Lacan) who had made such an impression in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936). (That aspect of the film is a total success, as Bataille's performance is simply luminous.)

Renoir wrote the screenplay himself, already with the location in mind, a location with great personal resonance: to represent Maupassant's rural setting along the Seine, by 1936 already too urbanized, Renoir chose the banks of the Loing river at Montigny where his father, the great Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, had worked, where Renoir himself had bought a house in 1922 and where he had shot La Fille de l'Eau (1925). (And indeed his next film Nana [1926] also had a connection with the area: the figure of Nana in the original Émile Zola novel was inspired by one of the paintings Auguste Renoir did at Montigny-sur-Loing.)

So a personal project, with Renoir surrounding himself with family and friends to make it: nephew Claude Renoir on camera, partner Marguerite Renoir in charge of editing, friends like Jacques Brunius (performing the role of Rodolphe under a pseudonym), the future directors Jacques Becker, Luchino Visconti, Yves Allegret, the famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson…

Following the Maupassant original, the script was written for fine summer weather and in July 1936 the crew gathered for one week of location shooting, only to see the weather turn to rain and still not let up by the beginning of September. There were personal tensions, money constantly ran out, and the director himself, after absenting himself on several occasions, eventually abandoned the production in order to start work on his next contracted film, Les Bas-fonds. Subsequently, Marguerite Renoir edited what had been shot, which impressed producer Pierre Braunberger enough for him to contemplate turning it into a full-length feature, contracting two new scripts, one by Jacques Prévert (which Renoir disliked) and the other by Michèle Lahaye (but by then Renoir was working on La Grande Illusion). The second world war intervened, the edited print was destroyed, and it was only in 1946 that Braunberger, on his return to Paris, commissioned Marguerite Renoir to perform a second editing (from an uncut negative preserved by Henri Langlois in the Cinémathèque Française) and Joseph Kosma to compose a score. This was then released to much acclaim on 8 May 1946, ten years after the actual shooting.

Renoir keeps very close to the narrative events of Maupassant's original. Parisian ironmonger Monsieur Dufour (André Gabriello) leads a family outing to a countryside setting on the banks of the Seine. Along with him come his plump wife Juliette (Jeanne Marken), his young daughter Henriette (Sylvia Bataille), the old grandmother (Gabrielle Fontan), and his shop assistant Anatole (Paul Temps), already destined to marry Henriette. They stop at a small inn, the innkeeper and servant of which are played by none other than Renoir himself and his partner Marguerite Renoir. The party's naïve responses to the unfamiliar rural surroundings are treated with derision by a couple of young upper-class layabouts, Rodolphe (Jacques Borel) and Henri (Georges Saint-Saëns); and Rodolphe then puts into action, with Henri in tow, a plan to seduce the young Henriette and her plump, luscious mother. (In fact, Rodolphe and Henri's class orgins and the class relationship between them and the Dufour party are probably unclear to a modern audience, which is just as likely, initially at least, to view the two young men as a couple of local boatmen.)

Rodolphe's languid insouciance about his seduction plan (including the implications for the lower-class Henriette of being seduced, about which Henri at least is more aware) even leads him to allow Henri to pursue Henriette, who he initially had his eye on, in favour of satisfying himself with the mother. The two seductions are treated entirely differently: Rodolphe's has a comic tone, even to the point of seeing him prancing around Madame Dufour, like some mock version of the Greek god Pan; while Henri's takes on a serious tone, as the emotional connection between the two starts to deepen, and then, ultimately, a tragic tone. The tragedy is in Henriette's future, as the film's epilogue makes clear, for what happens on this day changes nothing in regard to how her life has already been planned out (marriage to the ridiculous Anatole) and leaves her with nothing but regret.

The deviations from the original story that were forced on Renoir by production circumstances proved to be entirely serendipitous. In the first place, two sequences taken from Maupassant (the Dufours setting off from their shop at the beginning, Henri visiting the shop at the end and learning of Henriette's fate) and planned to be shot in a studio were, with the abandonment of the production, never filmed. This has left us with a film entirely shot on location, leading to a crucial transformation of the tone of the narrative. Maupassant's cynical little story evinces no particular interest in or feeling for the natural surroundings in which it is set. But Renoir's film is an entirely different matter: here, the natural world, and in particular the river (the same river flowing on from the end of Boudu perhaps?), are absolutely vital to the film, playing an equal role to that of the characters and story, and indeed reflecting back on them. Moreover, the changes in weather forced on the filmmakers (away from Maupassant's hot summer setting) now seem absolutely essential to the meaning and emotion of the film.

So, the very first shot of the film (over which the credits roll) shows only the flowing water of the river, establishing itself as the dominant motif of the film, with all its traditional associations of life flowing onwards irrespective of individual joys and sorrows. Then, to start the story off, we get an establishing wider shot of the river and the trees along its side, and then a fishing rod intrudes vertically into the frame, a sign of the film shifting to concentrate on the characters of the story (here, to introduce the Dufours).

This shift from nature to the characters and then back again is a constant movement within the film. Our first view of Rodolphe and Henri is a shot from inside the inn, double-framing them within the doorway with the natural world forming a background behind them. We then withdraw with them into the shuttered interior and then this is followed by the renowned and much commented sequence which returns us to the world outside. Rodolphe and Henri sit at a table with the shuttered window behind them; then Rodolphe, on the left, leans away from us to open the shutters and reveal - with a sense of dazzling illumination - the outside world to us, principally Henriette and her mother on swings in the garden outside. After a series of shots, both wide and close-up, depicting Henriette's absolute physical joy at these surroundings and depicting, too, the male reactions to her (a line of boys, passing seminarians), the film then returns to Henri and Rodolphe's conversation, shot first from outside framed in the window and then continued inside.

This to-and-fro movement is emblematic of the film and is where the location shooting is absolutely central to its success. So too is the way the footage of the bad summer weather the production experienced is integrated into the film. Following Henriette's seduction, we get a series of shots of the increasingly bad weather: darkening clouds, strengthening wind, and the heavier and heavier rain on the river itself; which then leads into the doleful epilogue, where the shots of the river and surroundings seem to have a dark, mournful tone to them, so appropriate to Henriette's own feelings to her life.

This DVD from the BFI is, as I've said, a gem. Visually, the transfer looks great; Philip Kemp's audio commentary, while in the main not scene-specific, offers a lot of useful comments and background information; and the extras include some interesting material from the Cinémathèque Française comprising discarded takes and screen tests (even if, at 42 minutes, perhaps over-long for a lot of viewers).

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002