After having quite a prolific career in both Europe and the United States, and having made films quite late into his life, it’s tough to imagine that Jean Renoir, one of cinema’s finest directors, had many instances of projects that didn’t manifest as he intended them to, most of his work being well-crafted and very personal to the director, as is very well-documented through his many lectures and discussions about his career that have been captured on film. However, there is at least one film that unfortunately could not come to fruition in the way Renoir intended, which is a much more staggering loss when we realise how much promise there was initially, especially in comparison to the final product. A Day in the Country (French: Partie de campagne), which is based on the short story by the celebrated Guy de Maupassant (with whom Renoir had a very personal connection, with the writer having been close friends with the director’s father), is a film that had an abundance of potential – a daring parable set in the expansive plateaux of pastoral France, which served as the stage for a thrilling story of romance, the film could have been an absolute masterpiece, had poor weather conditions and several other small factors not prevented Renoir from completing the film, which stood dormant for a decade before the raw footage was edited and released as the 40-minute long featurette that the director may not have distanced himself from, but certainly did not embrace in the same way that he did his more fully-formed, complex works for which he carried a much more sincere sense of pride.

For what it’s worth, my issue with A Day in the Country is not at all focused on the quality of the filmmaking or the nature of the story – both are impeccable. This is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, and everything about it on a formal level is brilliant, as it stands, it could be one of Renoir’s most fascinating works. The problem is how incomplete it feels – running at less than an hour, the film feels like it is caught between two extremes, both of which would have been a more effective means to tell this story. The film is too short to be a feature, but also slightly too long to stand as a strong short film – the burden of the 40-minute film is that these are often either short films that ran too long, or instances where a filmmaker had a bold idea, but not enough material came about to allow it reach a more traditional length. A Day in the Country is neither, since it has an abundance of great ideas, but suffered conditions that were beyond the director’s control, which caused him to abandon the project and simply take on other works (which would go on to be some of his best, so it was not a total loss), cutting his losses and just allowing it to flourish organically when the time came to shape it into something coherent. The extent to which Renoir intended to expand on what was already shot is not known (but based on the fact that it was adapted from a short story that was already well-covered by what was filmed, it’s not likely there was too much lost), but it’s often in these elisions that we find the most interesting material, especially since the effort that went into creating something coherent from what was incomplete material.

However, as much as we can lament on the fact that we will never see the definitive version of A Day in the Country as intended under the director’s vision, only focusing on this distracts from the fact that what we do have is a very strong effort all on its own, a film that bears many (if not all) of the same distinctive traits that made Renoir’s understanding of cinema so wonderful to witness. No one saw the world in quite the same way as he did – he developed a sense of functional optimism, a kind of way of looking at life that drew attention to its beauties but never felt like it was blinded by the need to be positive, instead facilitating actively engaging conversations. The story of an entire love affair compacted into a single afternoon is one of the many experimental ideas that propelled Renoir and several of his peers, who were constantly searching for new ways to make the intangible ennui of social realism seem much more compelling. It’s not enough to have a vibrant and earnest depiction of society – it only becomes authentic when it is accompanied by something of value in terms of how it uses these ideas. Renoir may have defaulted to more stylistic productions later on, but it’s always these smaller, more intimate satires that mean the most, and A Day in the Country had the potential to be one of his most enduring works, had his vision been fully realized. The traces of both Le Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game are present here, so one has to wonder how much of those films were constructed from the theoretical off-cuts that never came about from this film – and considering this film was technically made before both of those, but released in the following decade, it is easy to fall victim to the belief that A Day in the Country is a minor work in comparison when in reality it was the one that essentially allowed these more notable films to exist in the first place.

There’s something to be said about how Renoir constructs his films that makes A Day in the Country so wonderful. A cursory discussion of the film will bring up the fact that Renoir was not the only genius on set – Jacques Becker served as one of his assistant directors, while the celebrated Luchino Visconti worked as a set dresser, which may seem like a redundant responsibility when the majority of the story takes place in nature, but which still has a lot of value, especially in the small details that make the film so captivating. The film was a collision of so many incredible artists, including the author of the source material, whose work set the foundation for this terrific film. Narratively, A Day in the Country is slightly peculiar, which can be attributed to the incomplete nature of the film – but in terms of form, the film is absolutely stunning. Renoir had a knack for capturing human faces – every one of his actors is framed so beautifully, even when playing characters that are more dastardly or despicable. He clearly found so much insight into these striking images, and every frame of the film is occupied by either a gorgeous view of nature, or an actor occupying the space, and in both instances, we are immediately captivated and drawn into this world. On a purely formal level, it’s difficult to not swoon over the imagery present in A Day in the Country, which makes us wonder how gorgeous the eventual film may have been had Renoir been able to complete it as per his intentions.

There is always a degree of admiration that must go into instances of making the incomplete feel like coherent and logical, and A Day in the Country is a perfect example of the extent to which raw material can be shaped to create something exceptional. Many filmmakers have remarked that a film is essentially made or broken in the editing room since the decision of what to keep and what to cut is one that has daunted many individuals. This film looks at this principle from the perspective of a filmmaker not having the luxury to cut down since the material was incomplete to begin with – but it begs the question as to whether any work of art is necessarily complete, especially since A Day in the Country is a tremendous film not in spite of its challenges, but as a result of them. There’s an enigmatic quality that lives in the elided moments that feels extremely valuable and well-constructed, and it piques our curiosity, hinting at the fact that there is more to the story, and inviting the viewer to occupy a position where we fill in the gaps ourselves, which can be an invigorating and powerful approach to our understanding of the narrative process. In both theory and execution, A Day in the Country is a wonderful curio of a film, one that is not necessarily perfect by any means, but has a degree of complexity that is exceptionally well-crafted and fascinating, and which proposes ideas that would otherwise just not exist had Renoir, whether he considered the film a success or a failure, made a few bold leaps into the unknown, resulting in this wonderfully odd but always consistently captivating romantic drama.