Based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country was the result of Renoir's desire to make "a short film which would be made with the same care as a feature-length film." Because of problems in production-a postscript that went unfilmed-it is often called an "unfinished masterpiece," however Renoir and historians agree that this is a perfectly finished work. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, its images alive with light and shadow, it evokes the Impressionist painters-in particular, the director's father, Auguste Renoir-in describing a Paris family's journey to the country and an impossible, short-lived love among the riverside reeds. Truly one of the great coming-of-age films-a film of awakening-it moves almost imperceptibly from gaiety to despair, from nostalgia to abject longing. Renoir's assistants on the film included Visconti, Jacques Becker, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. "We were a bunch of friends, and it all seemed like a kind of happy vacation on the banks of a very pretty river" (Renoir). Editing was interrupted by no fewer than five major films and a world war, and the finished A Day in the Country premiered in 1946.