Le Dejuner Sur L'Herbe

Jean Renoir - 1959
Stylistically, this could, apart from the colour, nearly be Renoir in the '30s. The shots are longer, perhaps the takes also, and we have that classic sitting around, talking about life, with desires and a sense of matter.
It doesn't have the hard artificial lightingh of his other colour work I've seen; the natural lighting is so hard anyway, the brilliant sunlight. In it, the colours are so vivid, the greens really are memorable. There is something in the forest setting, the piper, the Grecian memories, almost of the locale of Starub-Huillet; the idea of life as infinitely rich, small things.
This is, in many ways, a modern film in that bodies are no longer 'mine' or 'yours', but there is a larger definition of flesh that is coefficient with scientific explanations and purely erotic ones. There is a real lustiness here, and science isn't really straightforwardly attacked; it is just a natural part of life, it nearly seems (though Renoir wants to remind us about romance). The idea of the stolid bourgeoise is best put across in the storm, where the images really come to life, in that kind of blown away dignity where we see they are ridiculous, and they are human.