Books, Arts & Manners: As It Is Lived

Generous and wise, Bertrand Tavernier’s A Sunday in the Country is small without being trivial, moving without being sentimental, wistful but not without letting laughter cut in on the nostalgia. It does something greater than show us “fear in a handful of dust”—it shows us the unease, sadness, fear in a handful of generally carefree hours in the country one late summer day in 1912. And it shows how one lives on with such fears, disappointments, and heartaches, and keeps hoping for the next Sunday.

Based on a short novel by the late novelist and screenwriter Pierre Bost, Monsieur Ladmiral va bientôt mourir, the film was written by Tavernier and his wife, Colo, from whom he is separated. The screenplay is about one-half Bost and one-half Taverniers, and it is a marvel how well the three blend. The theme, as Danièle Bion puts it in her book on Tavernier, is “Nothing but a bourgeois family at the start of the century and, magnified with a loupe, the intermittences of the heart.” That Proustian allusion is apposite: Even though A Sunday in the Country lasts only 94 minutes, it has many of the qualities of Proust’s great novel in parvo; in particular the almost aching love for the minutiae of living, and the sense of how the carelessnesses and unthinking cruelties of those we love hurt us. But there is no time to bleed; life rushes us on too fast.

JS

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John Simon

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Generous and wise, Bertrand Tavernier’s A Sunday in the Country is small without being trivial, moving without being sentimental, wistful but not without letting laughter cut in on the nostalgia. It does something greater than show us “fear in a handful of dust”—it shows us the unease, sadness, fear in a handful of generally carefree hours in the country one late summer day in 1912. And it shows how one lives on with such fears, disappointments, and heartaches, and keeps hoping for the next Sunday.

Based on a short novel by the late novelist and screenwriter Pierre Bost, Monsieur Ladmiral va bientôt mourir, the film was written by Tavernier and his wife, Colo, from whom he is separated. The screenplay is about one-half Bost and one-half Taverniers, and it is a marvel how well the three blend. The theme, as Danièle Bion puts it in her book on Tavernier, is “Nothing but a bourgeois family at the start of the century and, magnified with a loupe, the intermittences of the heart.” That Proustian allusion is apposite: Even though A Sunday in the Country lasts only 94 minutes, it has many of the qualities of Proust’s great novel in parvo; in particular the almost aching love for the minutiae of living, and the sense of how the carelessnesses and unthinking cruelties of those we love hurt us. But there is no time to bleed; life rushes us on too fast.