General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

A Day in the Country

A Day in the Country (French: Partie de campagne) is a French short feature written and directed by Jean Renoir in 1936, adapted from Guy de Maupassant's 1881 short story of the same name, and released in 1946 after production was abandoned and the film was completed from existing footage by Renoir's team¹. It follows a Parisian shopkeeping family on a Sunday picnic in the countryside, where two local boatmen romance the mother and the grown daughter, and it closes years later with a brief reunion that turns the outing into a story of lost love¹^•².

Key fact	Detail
Production and release	Shot in 1936, abandoned during production, completed by Renoir's team from existing footage, released 8 May 1946¹
Running time	40 to 41 minutes, black and white, 1.37:1¹^•³
Key crew	Producer Pierre Braunberger (Panthéon Productions); cinematography Claude Renoir; music Joseph Kosma; editing Marguerite Renoir and Marinette Cadix⁴
Principal cast	Sylvia Bataille (Henriette), Georges D'Arnoux (Henri), Jane Marken (Mme Dufour), André Gabriello (M. Dufour), Jacques B. Brunius (Rodolphe), Paul Temps (Anatole)⁴
Assistants	Luchino Visconti, Jacques Becker, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Yves Allégret, and Claude Heymann among the assistant directors⁴
Standing	Hailed as an "unfinished masterpiece" on release; ranked =136 in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the greatest films⁵

Spoilers

Story

On a summer Sunday in 1860, Monsieur Dufour, a Parisian hardware dealer, takes his family into the country in a borrowed milkman's cart: his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughter Henriette, and Anatole, the apprentice expected to marry Henriette and take over the shop⁶^•⁷. At the riverside inn of Père Poulain, played by Renoir himself, the party meets two local young men, Henri and Rodolphe, who take the women boating while the men go fishing⁶. Engaged Henriette falls for her guide Henri, and the two share a brief love affair interrupted by a sudden thunderstorm⁸. An epilogue set years later shows Henriette, now married to the dreary Anatole, returning to the same spot and meeting Henri again, as both remember the single afternoon and what might have been⁶.

The setting is a condensed version of the impressionist Sunday outing, and Renoir described the film as a dialogue between his father, the painter Auguste Renoir, and Maupassant, who were friends despite opposite temperaments: the painter "always looks on the bright side," the writer "always looks on the dark side"⁹.

Production and abandonment

Renoir conceived the project as a short feature and wanted to experiment with the short-story film¹^•⁷. Shooting began on 27 June 1936 under a contract providing twelve days of filming on a budget of 250,000 francs¹⁰. Persistent rain disrupted the schedule, and Renoir rewrote the script for wet weather, so that the long rain scenes in the finished film are an adaptation to circumstances rather than a plan; he credited the storm with adding a dimension of cruelty and humanity to the story¹¹. He also moved the location from the Seine, which by the 1930s was lined with factories and steamboats, to the Loing near the Fontainebleau forest, closer to the riverside world his father had painted¹¹.

By late 1936, with production nearly finished, Renoir was called away to direct The Lower Depths and shooting was abandoned¹. Sylvia Bataille, praised as wonderful in the role of Henriette, never forgave Renoir for interrupting the production⁹.

Completion and release

The film reached theaters a decade after it was shot. Producer Pierre Braunberger pushed the project to completion over the following years, even contacting Douglas Sirk in 1938 in an attempt to finish it¹². After Renoir had left for Hollywood, the footage shot in 1936 was recovered at the Liberation and edited a second time, without the director, by members of his team who remained in France¹³^•¹⁴. The completed 40-minute version opened in Paris on 8 May 1946, was selected at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival², and began circulating outside France in 1947¹⁵.

Reception and standing

On release the film was hailed as an "unfinished masterpiece," and it has since grown into one of Renoir's best-loved works⁵. Critics have singled out the way its light comic tone modulates into sadness and regret in the final scenes⁸, and Renoir's biographer Philip Kemp has described it as "maybe the best unfinished film ever made"¹⁶. In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the greatest films of all time it was ranked jointly 136th⁵.

Production lore. The set drew an unusual group of future directors and artists as assistants: Jacques Becker, Luchino Visconti, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Yves Allégret, and Claude Heymann⁴. Renoir's family circle was also central: his nephew Claude Renoir shot the film and his companion Marguerite Renoir edited it¹⁰. The surviving outtakes, published on the Criterion edition as an 89-minute compilation titled Un tournage à la campagne, are the only set of outtakes for any Renoir film and show him directing actors from the first line of dialogue¹⁷^•¹⁸.

Note on the title

The English title A Day in the Country has also been used for unrelated works, including a 1953 Joe Besser comedy short released in 3-D¹⁹, a 1974 Raymond Depardon documentary about Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's presidential campaign (1974, une partie de campagne)²⁰, and several student and independent shorts²¹.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026