Partie de campagne

Shimmering sunlight floods this impressionistic adaptation of Maupassant’s novella of the same name. Yet it is not really the airy, liberated summer day atmosphere of the pictures of his father Auguste Renoir that Jean Renoir chooses to anchor perhaps the most famous picknick in film history. The blinkered petty bourgeois day-trippers, first and foremost married couple the Dufours and their nincompoop of a soon-to-be son-in-law, are less enamored by the idyllic mood than the enthusiastic, sensitive daughter of the house, whose amorous rendezvous already contains a healthy dose of melancholy and disappointed hope. One of Renoir’s most profound and moving films. (mg)