Intended as a poem to spring but filmed under torrential rains, meant to be a short film until circumstances reduced it further, A Day in the Country finally gets a Blu-ray release. How memory construes pleasure is one of its themes. Fittingly, the version I saw eleven years ago was a reproduction of a reproduction: a videotape copy of a reel to reel, soundtracked by so many pops that I might have been on the banks of the Loigne River itself serenaded by bullfrogs. But Jean Renoir’s 1936 film has the curve of a longer feature, the plenitude of a pop song.

It has been said many times over the years that A Day in the Country is an homage to Renoir’s father, the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste who could have titled many of his paintings after the Guy de Maupassant story adapted by Jean. Marxist art critic and professional grouch John Berger remarked famously that Renoir, pere was “the last painter who was able to accept frankly bourgeois values of security, domesticity and leisure.” Indeed, the country lunch planned by Parisian shop owner Monsieur Dufour would not have been possible fifty years earlier; the sexual adventures of Henriette (Sylvia Bataille, wife of the writer) and her mother Madame Dufour (Jane Markekn) would not offer such a tangle of enthusiasm, submission, and regret fifty years later. A Day in the Country is also distinguished for being Renoir’s first substantial experiment with the generosity that characterized the major picture like The Rules of the Game. Although he films an extended scene in which Henri (Georges D’Arnoux, sporting a blond mustache) and Rodolphe (Jacques B. Brunius, pomaded hair and stocky) sketch out over a tarragon omelet how they’re going to seduce mother and daughter, they don’t come off as louts so much as other animals in Renoir’s tableaux, like the ducks and chirping nightingale. The Maupassant story revels in cynicism; from what I remember he snickers over the sex like a sleazo showing you dirty pictures.

That’s all that happens in A Day in the Country. While Dufour is distracted by a Laurel and Hardy-esque pair of fisherman who are the film’s only annoyance, Rodolphe and Henri get to work on the women. The conceit is that Renoir presents the women’s sexuality as unabashedly as the men’s; like the bourgeois housewife in Boudu Saved From Drowning, Madame Dufour is begging for a fuck. Henriette is more complicated, the virgin attracted to but frightened by sex. He includes no peripheral characters as tut-tutting what is about to happen (even so the movie went unseen for ten years). The subtlety with which Renoir presents her response to the seduction honors the arc of her character. The girl on the swing at the beginning of the picture who admitted to “a vague sense of yearning” to her oblivious mother and a pagan appreciation of the leaves, grass, and bugs looks like a frightened doe when Rodolphe is on top of her. My initial horror — she looks like she’s getting raped — turned to delight when Henriette envelops and kisses him without restraint before shading to a complex melancholy. As the freeze frame above shows, Renoir captures her in extreme closeup realizing exactly what sex for the first time feels like — in every sense of that phrase. Important too that Rodolphe’s determination has trace of unease.

The forty-one minutes of A Day in the Country show Renoir’s unforced mastery. A pedantic filmmaker would have let Henriette’s comment about nature stand on its own; instead, a dissolve from grey cloudy sky to Henriette and her mother in a doorway is a visual correlative. When the skiffs laden with passengers reach their destination — a distant bank — the soundtrack disappears, replaced by the sound of birds, crickets, and distant splashes. The camera dollies across the river for almost a full minute, not a human in sight; it augurs a similar moment in Renoir’s most satisfying Hollywood movie The Southerner. And the nature that Henriette had celebrated turns sinister, as a point of view shot establishes before the tryst in the woods ends. Beauty and terror — a tension that stops for no one.

A Day in the Country is available on Criterion Blu-Ray.