Partie de Campagne (1936) (Blu-ray) (UK Import)

Finally released in 1946, ten years after it was made, Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne was hailed as an unfinished masterpiece. Since then, his masterly adaptation of a Maupassant story has grown in reputation to the point where it is now considered by many to be Renoir’s best-loved film. On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl leaves her family and fiancé for a while, and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. Shot on location on the banks of two small tributaries of the Seine, Renoir’s sensuous tribute to the countryside – and to the river – has seldom been surpassed. In its bittersweet lyricism, its tenderness and poetic feel for nature, its tolerant satire of bourgeois conventions and its poignant sense of the transience of innocence and love, Partie de campagne seems to distil the essence of all that is most personal of Renoir’s art.

Restored in 2K and presented in High Definition
Archive audio commentary by film historian and critic Philip Kemp (2003)
Un tournage à la campagne (1994, 89 mins): a selection from the outtakes heldat the Cinémathèquefrançaise, compiled by filmmaker Alain Fleischer as part of the celebrations of thecentenary of Jean Renoir’s birth
Screen tests (1936): a selection of screen tests shot inJune 1936, assembled by Claudine Kaufmann
Jean Renoir Lecture (1963): an audio recordingof a lecture and Q&A given by Jean Renoir at the BFI’s National Film Theatre
Illustrated booklet with new essays by Barry Nevin and Pasquale Iannone and biography of Jean Renoir by Philip Kemp