Exactly that and no more. The Sunday is somewhere in the calendar year 1905 or thereabouts, and the country is French, more precisely that patch of it owned by a venerated artist whom artistic fashion has long since left behind, and who struggles now with the big decision of whether to put yet another cat upon yet another draped divan in yet another corner of his atelier -- or rather, same cat, same divan, same corner. The intention of the cinematography, plain to any but a blind man, is to evoke the Impressionist vision that has shoved aside the laborious Chardinesque still lifes of the protagonist; and it must be counted a minor triumph that this Impressionist phantasmagoria remains fluid, unforced, a total environment rather than a handful of Art History flash cards. But the legitimate complaint here is that the imitative visual style -- Impressionist not just in the sense that Renoir or Monet is, but also in the sense Rich Little is -- carries the bald and literal-minded suggestion that the Impressionist truth was there for all to see: all, here again, but a blind man. And where does that leave our turtlish protagonist? Bertrand Tavernier does not mean to chide, however. A post-New Wave filmmaker, and like several of the official New Wavers a former film critic as well, he has ostentatiously taken up the cause of the "literary" cinema which the New Wave sought to wash away. And A Sunday in the Country, based on a novel by the old-guard screenwriter Pierre Bost, can readily be seen as a valentine, or at least a sympathy card, to the artistically unfashionable. With Louis Decreux, Michael Aumont, and Sabine Azéma. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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