Partie De Campagne (Region B BLU-RAY)

UK Import. Blu-Ray disc is Region B locked. Will only play on All Region players.

Finally released in 1946, 10 years after it was shot, Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne was hailed as one of the great unfinished masterpieces. Since then, this masterly adaption of Guy de Maupassant story has grown in reputation to the point where it is counted among Renoir’s best-loved films.

On a country picnic, a young woman leaves her family and fiancé for a while and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. In its bittersweet lyricism, tenderness, poetic feel for nature, tolerant satire of bourgeois conventions and poignant sense of the transience of innocence and love, the film seems to distil the essence of all that is most personal to Renoir’s art. Partie de campagne was digitised and restored by Les Films du Panthéon with Les Films du Jeudi and La Cinémathèque française, with the support of the CNC and the contribution of the Fonds Culturel Franco-Américain (DGA-MPA-SACEM-WGAW).

Extras

• 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 held at La Cinémathèque française, complied by filmmaker Alain Fleischer as part of the celebrations of the centenary of Jean Renoir’s birth
• Screen Tests (1936, 9 mins): a selection of screen tests shot in June 1936, assembled by Claudine Kaufmann
• Jean Renoir Lecture (1963,89 mins): an audio recording of a lecture and Q&A given by Jean Renoir at the BFI’s National Film Theatre
• First pressing limited to 2,000 copies. Illustrated booklet with new essays by Barry Nevin and Pasquale Iannone and biography of Jean Renoir by Philip Kemp