An unfinished gem - Renoir's A Day in the Country

Another thing for which to blame the Nazis, in case we needed one more, is that French director Jean Renoir decamped for America without ever completing his 1936 film, A Day in the Country, so what we have via the gods of Criterion is a 40-minute version that shows the promise of being a great film but of course leaves so much undeveloped that it reaches for the stars but never gets there. The film, based on a de Maupassant story that I've never read, is about a family of four (plus a shop assistant) from Paris who take a weekend jaunt into the countryside and stop at a little country in for a "picnic" (what's the term? dejournee sur les herbes? - same as the title of Renoir pere's great painting?). A couple of country boys who work at the inn spy the Parisians and make plans to distract the men and seduce the ladies (young, sweet girl, daughter of shopkeeper and destined to marry the doltish shop assistant, who plays the role far too grossly for this film; her mother, a flighty, bossy, silly woman who willingly throw off her taciturn husband for the fling w/ the much younger man). There are a lot of themes touched on here - country v city, class issues, miscommunications, sexual energy - and we can see that Renoir was building toward an ending of great pathos as the characters return to the scene years later and look back on the missed opportunities of their lives - but the movie just sketches this in, necessarily. It's also a great example throughout of how well Renoir worked en plein air - beautiful pastoral scenes, that make a nice contrast with his cultivated pastoral in the great Rules of the Game. The movie unfortunately has a horrible, cloying musical score that intrudes rather than heightens the emotion of the film, and I have to believe Renoir never approved the score. Still worth watching - but not if it's your first Renoir film.