Jean Renoir

A Day in the Country

A Day in the Country

This bittersweet film from Jean Renoir, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family’s picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men. Conceived as a short feature, the project had nearly finished production in 1936 when Renoir was called away for The Lower Depths. Shooting was abandoned then, but the film was completed with the existing footage by Renoir’s team and released in its current form in 1946, after the director had already moved on to Hollywood. The result is a warmly humanist vignette that ranks among Renoir’s most lyrical works, with a love for nature imbuing its every beautiful frame.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1936
  • 41 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.37:1
  • French
  • Spine #746

Special Features

  • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Introduction by director Jean Renoir from 1962
  • The Road to “A Day in the Country,” a new interview with Renoir scholar Christopher Faulkner about the film’s production
  • Renoir at Work, a new video essay by Faulkner on Renoir’s methods
  • Un tournage à la campagne, an eighty-nine-minute 1994 compilation of outtakes from the film
  • Interview with producer Pierre Braunberger from 1979
  • Screen tests
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Gilberto Perez

    New cover by Sarah Habibi

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Introduction by director Jean Renoir from 1962
  • The Road to “A Day in the Country,” a new interview with Renoir scholar Christopher Faulkner about the film’s production
  • Renoir at Work, a new video essay by Faulkner on Renoir’s methods
  • Un tournage à la campagne, an eighty-nine-minute 1994 compilation of outtakes from the film
  • Interview with producer Pierre Braunberger from 1979
  • Screen tests
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Gilberto Perez

    New cover by Sarah Habibi
A Day in the Country
Cast
Sylvia Bataille
Henriette
Georges D’Arnoux
Henri
Jane Marken
Madame Dufour
André Gabriello
Monsieur Dufour
Jacques Brunius
Rodolphe
Paul Temps
Anatole
Gabrielle Fontan
Grandmother
Jean Renoir
Père Poulain
Marguerite Houlle Renoir
Waitress
Credits
Director
Jean Renoir
Written by
Jean Renoir
Based on the short story by
Guy de Maupassant
Produced by
Pierre Braunberger
Cinematography
Claude Renoir
Music
Joseph Kosma
Editing
Marinette Cadix
Editing
Marguerite Houlle Renoir

Current

Renoir at Work
Renoir at Work
Among the most exciting supplements on our new release of Jean Renoir’s classic short A Day in the Country is an eighty-nine-minute compilation of outtakes from the film, titled Un tournage à la campagne, which features revelatory behind-the-scen…
A Day in the Country: Jean Renoir’s Sunday Outing
A Day in the Country: Jean Renoir’s Sunday Outing

The late film scholar beautifully analyzes the visual lyricism of the French master’s legendary short work.

By Gilberto Perez

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Davy Chou’s Top 10

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Matías Piñeiro on Reimagining the Rhythms of Shakespeare

Before the New York Film Festival premiere of Hermia and Helena, his 2016 riff on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Argentine director stopped by to discuss the Bard and the movies that shaped him as a filmmaker.

By Hillary Weston

Explore

Jean Renoir

Writer, Director

Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir

The son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was also a master of his medium: cinema. After making his mark in the early thirties with two very different films, the anarchic send-up of the bourgeoisie Boudu Saved from Drowning and the popular-front Gorky adaptation The Lower Depths, Renoir closed out the decade with two critical humanistic studies of French society that routinely turn up on lists of the greatest films ever made: Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game (the former was celebrated in its time, but the latter was trashed by critics and audiences—until history provided vindication). After a brief, unfulfilling Hollywood stint during World War II, Renoir traveled to India to make his first Technicolor film, The River, and then returned to Europe in the early fifties to direct three visually dazzling explorations of theater, The Golden Coach, French Cancan, and Elena and Her Men. Renoir persisted in his cinematic pursuits until the late sixties, when, after the completion of The Little Theater of Jean Renoir, a collection of three short films, he decided to dedicate himself solely to writing, leaving the future of the medium to those who looked to him in reverence.