Day In The Country, A (DVD)
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.
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