Partie de campagne

★★★★★

If one were to be marooned in a distinct period of film history, the French Poetic Realism of the 1930s and 40s would certainly be a most agreeable place to be stranded in. It was here that the artistic achievements of impressionist filmmaking were combined with expert storytelling based in the reality of pre-war Front populaire France – an amalgam which proved to be an essential influence for Italian neorealismo and the 1960s’ Nouvelle Vague. To this day, films like Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Marcel Carné’s Le quai des brumes, Le jour se lève, and Les enfants du paradis, or Jean Renoir’s famous triptych La grande illusion, La bête humaine, and La règle du jeu stand tall as masterstrokes by any measure. One of the most fascinating products of that unique point in the history of cinema, however, is an unfinished project: in 1936, Renoir started an adaptation of a story by Guy de Maupassant but abandoned it due to bad weather. Ten years later, producer Pierre Braunberger re-edited the existing footage and put together Partie de campagne.

Ganze Kritik auf The Zurich English Student (online einsehbar).