A Sunday in the Country

1,

A Riddle: like some literary works, Bertrand Tavernier’s A Sunday in the Country is equipped with an epigraph.  Before the movie’s first image, we hear a female voice pose a question: “When will you stop asking so much of life, Irene?”  Later, we learn that the voice belongs to Irene’s mother and the question is spoken in a brief flashback representing a memory experienced by the young woman.  Tavernier gives prominence to this snippet of dialogue because it is thematic.  Humans are desiring beings, forever yearning for ideal future happiness while, sometimes, ignoring the pleasures and satisfactions of the moment.  What does it require for people to be happy?  A Sunday in the Country depicts an idyllic world: it is 1912 and Europe, at least, is peaceful, free from the nightmares that would ensue later in the century.  The old painter’s estate is a locus amoenus – a place where all pleasures seem concentrated.  There’s no sickness, no Spanish flu, and no poverty nor privation.  The weather is uniquely glorious – June, it seems, in France or, perhaps, September.  The home is filled with beautiful objects and paintings.  Everyone is healthy and vigorous – at least, for now.  And, yet, in this ideal setting among handsome and pampered people, something is amiss.  To some degree, Tavernier’s film is about the riddle of human happiness: why do we ask too much of life?

2.

Bertrand Tavernier was one of the most intelligent of all film-makers.  He died on March 25. 2021, a month before his 80th birthday. Tavernier was born in Lyon, France in 1941.  His earliest memories were recollections of World War Two.  Tavernier’s father, Rene, was the editor of Positif, a journal that featured writers such as Louis Aragon.  Rene Tavernier was threatened by the Vichy regime, particularly when he published a translation of several chapters of Hemingway’s anti-Fascist novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Nonetheless, Rene Tavernier didn’t join the maquis – the Resistance.  Later, some accused Rene Tavernier and figures in the French film industry who produced movies during the Occupation for being collaborators with the Germans.  (This allegation is generally considered unfair, although it has occasionally achieved some traction with French intellectuals.  Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche were essentially blacklisted in French cinema on the basis of the accusation that they did not sufficiently resist the Germans.  Tavernier risked opprobrium by hiring Bost and Aurenche to write his first film, The Clockmaker.  A Sunday in the Country is an adaptation by a novel by Bost.)

Tavernier was a film brat who skipped school to watch movies.  He worked as an assistant for Jean-Pierre Melville.  When Tavernier expressed admiration for Fritz Lang’s Hollywood picture, Moonfleet, Melville was enraged (or pretended to be so), accused Tavernier of disloyalty and forbade anyone in the cast and crew of the film being shot to speak with him for three days.  Humiliated, Melville tried to quit.  Melville wouldn’t allow him to resign, reconciled with the young man, and hired him to do promotional work for the film – it was Los Doulos (The Wolves, a very tough gangster picture).   Tavernier worked in PR for a decade, promoting French New Wave films by Truffaut, Godard, and Agnes Varda – he also promoted American films in France, including late works by Howard Hawks and John Ford.  During this time period, Tavernier met many important film makers.  He had a famous falling-out with the notoriously prickly Stanlely Kubrick.  “You are a genius when it comes to directing,” Tavernier said, “but an imbecile in every other respect.  So, I quit.”  

Tavernier directed his first film, The Clockmaker in 1973.  Thereafter, he made three dozen or so pictures.  The most notable films made by Tavernier are Death Watch (1980) with Charlotte Rampling and Harvey Keitel, a prescient science fiction film that predicts Reality TV, Coup du Torchon, (1981) an adaptation of a Jim Thompson noir novel  translated from the American Deep South to French Equatorial Africa, and The Passion of Beatrice (1982).    After directing Sunday in the Country in 1984, Tavernier made ‘Round Midnight, about an American jazz musician in France – the picture stars jazz man, Dexter Gordon, and is probably the director’s most critically acclaimed.  (It’s inexplicably not available on DVD).  L623 is a cop movie about a police officer working undercover to bust drug dealers. Capitaine Conan is a brutal war film set during the WW I in Bulgaria – it’s about guerilla warfare.  Safe Conduct (2002) wrestles with the career of Jean Aurenche during World War Two and was a cause celebre in France, igniting an enormous controversy about the Resistance during the Vichy regime.  In the Electric Mist (2006) is a crime film set in the United States starring Tommy Lee Jones – it was well-reviewed in Europe but never released (except in edited direct-to-disk) form in this country.

All of Tavernier’s films are different in form, style, and subject matter.  One of his last movies, for instance, The Princess of Montpensier is an adaptation The Princess of Cleves, Madame de La Fayette’‘s 17th century novel.  Tavernier has also made notable documentaries including a film about immigrants to France and an excellent survey of French films made during the fifties and sixties, My Journey through French Cinema (2016) a great source of information on movies not widely released or known in this country.

Tavernier died just before completing his revision of a magisterial encyclopedia of American films.  (He was also a prolific writer.)  It is said that he never made a movie that didn’t interest him passionately.  He chose the subjects of the films that he made and had, more or less, complete autonomy within the French film industry.  There is no Tavernier style of film making – the technique of each movie is adapted to the individual requirements of the picture.  He has no equivalents in American cinema.

3.

Une Partie de Campagne haunts Tavernier’s similarly titled film (in French Un Dimanche a la Campagne).  Jean Renoir’s short masterpiece was shot in July 1936 but left incomplete because of terrible, rainy weather.  (Near the film ends, there is a majestic shot of rain dimpling the surface of a river.)  After World War Two, Renoir pieced the footage together to make the 40 minute feature that we know today.  (The movie wasn’t released until 1947 in France and 1950 in the United States.)  In Renoir’s Day in the Country, a bourgeois family picnics near a café along a river somewhere in the country near Paris.  We see a somewhat comical married couple, a bit overweight and in their forties, with their beautiful young daughter (played by the sublimely beautiful Sylvie Battaille).  The daughter’s rather dull fiancé has come along for the ride.  After lunch, the men get a little drunk and take a nap.  Two young men, apparently boaters, seduce the women while husband and fiancee are slumbering on the bank of the river.  A thunderstorm ensues and the seducers retreat to the café while the family departs for Paris in their horse-drawn wagon.  Years later, the young woman, now married, returns to the river with her husband.  Again, he falls asleep and, while walking along the stream, she encounters that man to whom she made love years earlier.  They say a few words and, then, the young woman’s husband awakes and the brief encounter ends with the boater hiding in the brush.

Renoir’s film, an action-packed blockbuster (almost a Michael Bay production) compared to Tavernier’s Sunday in the Country, casts an long shadow on the later movie.  Indeed, Tavernier refers to the movie in the scene in which Irene and her father dance at the gazebo near the river.  Several of the young men wear the striped shirts of 19th century boats-man in that sequence.  (Tavernier also references August Renoir’s famous painting of the boating party “Luncheon of the Boating Party.”)   One of Tavernier’s favorite French directors was Jacques Becker.  Becker (along with the Italian film maker Luchino Visconti) worked with Jean Renoir on A Day in the Country.  Both films share a tone of restrained, ennobled melancholy.  Most importantly, both movies reference the great era of Impressionist painting that flourished in France between 1860 and the turn of the 20th century.  In fact, many of the compositions in Jean Renoir’s Day in the Country are modeled off famous paintings by Renoir pere.  Similarly, Tavernier remarks that the country home where his film was made was adjacent to an estate where Manet painted.  

Impressionism is notable for its sunny exuberance and its optical celebration of the sensuous pleasures of life: bright Impressionist paintings feature beautiful women, flowers, gorgeous scenery and landscapes, picnics on the grass in a bright, sun-dappled world without shadow in which people pursue happiness with unmitigated zest.  These idyllic qualities characterize Tavernier’s film.  But in both Renoir and Tavernier’s films, a secret sorrow lurks beneath the glittering beauty – time passes and our joy is fleeting.  

Some critics, both French and American claim that A Sunday in the Country is a hommage to French Impressionism.  This assertion outraged the normally mild-mannered Tavernier.  Impressionism blurs the field of vision and flattens perspective to a tapestry-like frieze of color. Impressionist art is superficial, although in the way that described by Oscar Wilde: "It's only shallow people that don't judge by appearances.  The true mystery of the world is that is visible, not invisible."  Tavernier instructed his Director of Photography, Bruno de Keyzer, to devise a film palette that approximated the very first use of color in French films, Lumiere’s Autoscope process.  Keyzer achieved the desired texture for the movie by omitting the bleaching bath when the film-stock was developed.  Without bleaching, the film’s whites are very bright and, correspondingly, its dark or shadowy elements are very black.  (The process resulted in reds sometimes deepening into black – therefore, the red wine that the characters drink had to be diluted to a pink color or it would have appeared that the people in the film were pouring some kind of black brew into their mouths).  Without bleaching, colors were hard to control and Tavernier used different kinds of gels and filters on the camera lense to achieve the tints that he desired.  Lumiere’s Autoscope, as simulated by Tavernier’s developing process, has very deep focus and results in a precisionist imagery in which forms seem to be outlined by dark shadow.  Deep focus and clearly delineated form is the exact opposite of the techniques used by the great Impressionist painters.

However, to be fair to the critics, the style of Tavernier’s film may be inimical to Impressionism but, certainly, the content of the movie partakes in the pictorial language intrinsic to painting by French masters such as Caillebotte, Renoir, and Monet – all mentioned in the film.  The movie’s vocabulary of sun-drenched landscapes, flowering gardens, dejeuner sur l’herbe (picnics on the grass), beautiful young women, little girls in sunbonnets and the like all refer to pictorial elements that we associate with Impressionism – in fact, Tavernier installs in his film the little arched bridge over a stream edged with flowering plants that we know from Monet’s garden in Giverny.

4.

As we learn in the film, Ladmiral is an academic painter.  He admits that he never had the courage to follow the lead of the great Impressionists.  They labored, for part of their careers in maligned obscurity. Ladmiral has been decorated for his painting – that is, has achieved great public fame.  Further, Ladmiral notes that if he had imitated Cezanne or Renoir, he would have only exchanged one formula for another.  (He seems to acknowledge that the spark of genius is missing from his work – he has never been an innovator and it is, perhaps, too late now to change his style as he says.  In fact, he tells Irene that changing his style would have wounded his wife who was accustomed to the academic and classical way in which he painted – this seems a specious self-justification to me.)  Consistent with Ladmiral’s conservative approach to painting, Tavernier imitates the ancient films of Lumiere and shoots the movie in a way that approximates his protagonist’s precisely detailed and academic paintings.  The movie is shot the way that Ladmiral paints.  

Louis Ducreux plays Ladmiral.  Tavernier says that a highly intelligent actor is required to perform the role of a highly intelligent character – intelligence, Tavernier, avers can’t really be simulated.  Ducreux was a famous French man of the theater, both an actor and renowned director.  (He was also highly musical, composed the tunes for Max Ophuls’ films, and directed opera.)  Tavernier met Ducreux on a fine arts committee on which both men were serving – the director represented films; Ducreux was appointed as a representative of the classical theater.  Tavernier suspected the old man was senile because he never participated in the committee’s discussions.  When he invited Ducreux to lunch, he discovered that the old actor was feigning senility to avoid committee assignments that he thought would be onerous.  Ducreux was also a talented painter.  The little canvas that Irene discovers when scavenging for clothing in the attic (she runs a vintage clothing store in Paris) was painted by Ducreux.  

Although a brilliant actor, Ducreux had been in only one previous film, shot during the fifties.  He didn’t understand the process of making movies and never could find his mark.  Instead of moving to where he was supposed to go, Tavernier’s camera has to follow him.  Ducreux was so naive about filmmaking (although I suspect this was also feigned) that he would sometimes repeat a line that he had botched in the middle of a complicated moving camera-shot – “just edit it out,” he would tell Tavernier, without knowing, purportedly, that this was impossible.  In several scenes, other actors reach out to physical restrain Ducreux who is about to wander off-camera.  In an early scene, Ducreux is about to step into bright light that would obliterate the image – Edouard reaches out and seeming to caress the old man, actually keeps him from ruining the shot.  In the dance-hall scene, Sabina Azema, playing Irene, also subtly directs Ducreux to keep him from moving out of the frame.  

5.

Miracle: French summers can be very rainy.  As we have seen, Renoir’s A Day in the Country was vexed by bad weather to the point of exhausting its makers and rendering the film (which turned out to be a great masterpiece anyway) apparently incomplete.  By contrast, Tavernier reports that the weather was miraculously accommodating for the five week of shoot of A Sunday in the Country.  The tone of the film required that light levels be scrupulously matched between scenes – the film takes place over the course of a single day with light modulating from early morning to the brightness of midday and, then, dusk at night.  The weather cooperated and Tavernier was able to make the movie without encountering any difficulty.  Tavernier points to another weirdly miraculous event on the set.  When Mirielle somehow gets trapped in the tree, Tavernier recalls that a strong wind suddenly arose.  The child was frightened by the wind and began to cry in real distress.  The little girl playing Mirielle was not particularly expressive and Tavernier was having difficulty eliciting any realistic fear from her while shooting the scene in which she is rescued by her father (who himself almost falls out of the tree).  The sudden gust of wind, coming from nowhere, frightened the little girl into acting according to Tavernier’s direction.  (In his commentary on the movie, Tavernier suggests that the poodle, Caviar, was probably a better, more seasoned film actor than either the child playing Mirielle or Louis Ducreux.)

5.

Oedipal conflict is intrinsic to the relationship between the staid Edouard (called Gonzague by the old man) and his father.  Gonzague wished to become a painter like Ladmiral, but, perhaps, his father’s influence was too overwhelming.  Instead, he has become a bourgeois businessman of some kind, a staid and dignified figure far more conservative that his father.  The dutiful son and the old roue Ladmiral have nothing in common and, perhaps, don’t like one another that much.  (Remember that it’s possible to love intensely those that you don’t necessarily like.)   Edouard/ Gonzague has done everything that he can to win his father’s admiration – but his best is never enough.  The beautiful and vivacious Irene will always be the old man’s favorite.  He dotes upon her when he is dismissive of his son.  In a startling voice-over, Edouard seems to “stumble like a rejected lover” when he contemplates how much his father prefers the company of Irene to him – “all sorrow are alike,” we are told, the narration boldly equated disappointment in romantic love to Edouard’s grief that he can never quite please his narcissistic, self-absorbed father.  

Tavernier’s relationship to the great directors in French film has a similar character.  Tavernier is a generation younger that the film makers whose pictures were the glory of the French Nouvelle Vague (the “New Wave”).  Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, and Rivette were all fifteen years or so older than Tavernier.  Tavernier stands in relationship to the famous French New Wave directors as son to father.  The French New Wave rejected (in large part) the so-called “cinema of quality” that was the legacy of the generation preceding them.  Tavernier doesn’t reject the French New Wave, but he struggles to avoid its influence, making his own way that is independent from the themes of the film makers in the generation preceding him.  Thus, we see the primordial pattern of sons departing from the path established by their fathers.  Tavernier’s masters were directors like Jacques Becker and Jean Pierre Melville, men who made tough little movies in the hard-bitten early fifties.  He follows the example of those film makers and doesn’t work in the style of Truffaut and Godard.  (As further evidence for this point, Sunday in the Country is adapted from a novel by Pierre Bost.  Bost was most famous as screenwriter who crafted scripts for some of the most famous French films embodying the “cinema of quality” or “papa’s cinema” as Truffaut called these movies derisively in his 1954 Cahiers du Cinema essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”.)  Generational conflict is intrinsic to Tavernier’s film: we see the alliance between a grandfather and his grandchildren – as the joke goes grandfathers and grandchildren “share a common enemy.”

Sons must struggle to overcome the influence of their fathers.  This project is irrelevant to daughters.  Notice how Irene is capable of criticizing her father’s work without reservation. Although Edouard has not followed his father’s path (even to the extent of somehow evading the name his father gave him), he doesn’t dare to criticize Ladmiral’s painting – indeed, he seems to stand in awe of the old man’s work.  Irene blithely rearranges her father’s still life in the corner of the atelier.  And, at the end of the film, the old man puts aside the incomplete painting over which he was puttering and sets a new canvas on his easel.  We are led to believe that under the influence of his daughter’s scorn, the old man will attempt something new, something better – perhaps, as the final shot implies, a painting that is made “after nature”, something full of fresh air and old sorrow.  

6.

Gabriel Faure is the composer of the rapturous music on the soundtrack.  Faure’s music embodies the aesthetic of the Belle Epoque, the period in which film is set.  Tavernier chose this orchestral music because of its undertone of melancholy.  Much of the movie seems to mourn the absence of something – we shouldn’t expect too much from life: existence, after all, is characterized by what is missing. Ladmiral’s dead wife, whom we see in several short sequences, is an absence that haunts the film.  Irene’s unseen and absent lover controls her actions.  And Irene, although a manic bundle of furious action, is melancholy herself – she predicts Mirielle’s death before the little girl is fifteen.  (Presumably, we imagine that Mirielle will be perish in the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918; this leads to the gloomy surmise that the two high-spirited and combative boys will likely die in World War One.)  Most notably, Ladmiral’s atelier features a large canvas that seems to lament Irene’s absence – we see her portrait all in white prominently displayed in the house; there she is present.  But in the studio, Ladmiral has painted her absence – a shroud-like veil and a mandolin that suggest that someone has recently left the room.  Tavernier interprets Faure’s music as yearning for happiness that is never quite achieved.  In any event, the music is perfect for the film.  Elements of the movie refer obliquely to Proust, particularly scenes (for instance, picnic flashback) that show us a lost paradise.  Faure’s music appears in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, albeit ascribed to the fictional composer Vinteuil.

7.

Crane shots adorn several scenes in the film.  Tavernier had the use of a crane for only one (or, perhaps, two) days but he seems to have made the most of that piece of equipment.  The film’s camera style is interrogative – that is, the camera executes complex maneuvers as if it is searching for something.  This technique materializes the film’s concept of art as a search for something, either meaning or an embodied idea or a new technique.  Most sequences are long, featuring fluid camera movements.  On occasion, Tavernier violates the 360 degree rule, “crossing the axis” as it is said.  Notable examples occur when Irene enters to disrupt the film’s placid and static tone as the character’s recline for their post-prandial snooze.  At the end of the film, there is a 360 degree shot/reverse shot of Ladmiral standing on the train platform.  At first, we see him next to the train as it advances forward toward the camera, but, exquisitely adapting to the crepuscular mood, there is a cut to the train departing – the departure of the train into the dusk signifies the end of things, although the film will show us a little, hopeful epilogue.  A slightly later shot that shows Ladmiral walking along a large field-stone wall, a rampart that encloses and confines the old man, and, further, signifies the protagonist’s isolation and the implacable nature of his fate.  

8.

Beginning and Ending: the film’s opening shot, mirrored by the scene at the movie’s end, shows a tree across the lawn.  The tree’s leaves are prematurely autumnal – the rest of the woods remain verdantly green.  In context, we discover that the subtle light illumining the tree is dawn – it is sunrise.  The image has a magical quality.  It is like some of the pictures that we find in Tarkovsky’s films – a dimly lit interior that opens onto a landscape suffused with light.  As in Tarkovsky, the exterior world appears as if we behold the landscape from within the complex, obstructed space of Plato’s cave.  The outside enters our space only tentatively – mostly, we remain locked within our own imaginations.  Notably, the opening scene shows us three versions of the real: there is the landscape itself replete with golden shadows, the clear, if dark, version of the landscape reflected in the windows of the open door on one side of the aperture, and, then, the blurred, illegible forms that we see mirrored in the windows on the opposite side of the frame.  The window reminds us, if we are so inclined, that we are really beholding this world through the frame of a picture – there is actually nothing “real” before our eyes; the entire vista is “virtual.”  But the three versions of the landscape that the picture presents suggest something about art: we have a precisionist photographic representation of the thing, the thing as viewed through a dimly lit mirror (“as if through a glass darkly”), and, at last, the thing abstracted into a blur of faintly lit green and yellow forms.  If we wish, we can imagine this tripartite image as showing us how art is made, or providing us with different paradigms for art: realism, the picture as a mirror for the world, and, at last, the blurred and abstract forms of impressionism.  

The framed view from the Ladmiral’s window at the end of the movie corresponds to the blank canvas that the old man sets on his easel in the film’s coda.  (Tavernier remarks that this sequence is his invention – he shot the last scenes on a single afternoon after filming the script version of the ending, a sequence that he says was “very bad”.)  The white canvas reminds us of the fade-to-white in the picnic flashback.  A fade-to-white here signifies that the presence of the past, our remembrance of things past, has become bright, even, blinding and threatens to overwhelm what is now and here.  The blank canvas that Ladmiral views with restrained happiness is another absence of the kind that structures the film and may have several meanings.  Perhaps, Ladmiral has no future – the canvas is blank because there is nothing ahead of him.  But, more likely, the blank slate represents a new beginning for the old man, a new way to paint that he will explore on the morrow.  (This ending reminds me of Goya’s last cartoon, an image of an old man, bearded like God, hobbling forward supported by two canes under the words Aun Aprendo – “I am still learning.”)

The image of the blank canvas is followed the eerie and luminous shot of the darkened chamber (the camera’s interior on which pictures are exposed) opening onto the autumnal tree.  Viewed in chronological sequence, the picture of the tree could be thought of as representing twilight, the last fading rays of the sun.  But the image is clearly identical to what we saw at the start of the film and, so, probably, should be read as another dawn.  (Is it the end of the day or its beginning? A rising sun or one that is setting?  These questions are pertinent to the viewer.)  Tavernier advances the camera toward the window, tracking or dollying forward.  Yet at the same time, he uses a zoom lens to withdraw from scene.  Thus, we are given a visual metaphor for time – the picture shows us simultaneously an advance into the future and a pulling back and away into the past.  This is a mixed message, a jumble of past, present and future, that represents the scheme and content of Tavernier’s picture.