So the English title for this is “A Day in the Country,” and that’s basically what it is, albeit in a very French way (this is directed by Jean Renoir; you may recall him from such films as The Rules of the Game and The Grand Illusion). A Parisian family of dairy people (a husband and wife, their elderly mother, their basically-adult daughter, and the young man who’s an apprentice dairyman) go for a ride in the country, and stop at a riverside inn.

While there, two young men sit in the kitchen and watch the mother and daughter on a pair of swings, and have a discussion about the merits of seduction and dalliances. The rakish one (who has a large, twirlable mustache) is all for them; the more sober one thinks they’re more likely to lead to problems and complications — pregnancies, broken hearts, undesired marriages — and best avoided. But he agrees to be the rake’s wingman, and to seduce the mother (with whom he figures complications will be minimal).

And so they get the men out of the way by giving them fishing poles, but the seduction doesn’t go as planned: The cautious one ends up captivated by the young girl, so he takes her off to the woods while the rake goes off with the giggling mother. We see the rake prancing around like a mock-satyr with her, and then we cut to the other couple, who are in the woods watching and listening to a nightingale.

What follows with the two of them is one of those scenes where the old-timey “women must always resist ‘improper’ advances” thing makes it look really assaulty right up until she suddenly starts enthusiastically kissing him back. That will never not be super-uncomfortable.

We then cut to five years in the future, where a title card tells us that the daughter married the apprentice dairyman who lived in their household, and they are now vacationing in the country in the same place. Not only are they in the same place, but they’re actually in the little spot in the woods where the dude had kissed her… and oh look, here he comes while her husband is asleep. He’s all like “Remember that one time that we kissed and then probably banged off-camera? That was awesome” and she’s all like “oh yeah, totes, think about it every day,” and then they part as the husband wakes; the dude hides, and the married couple leaves.

That’s it, that’s the whole movie. It’s like 41 minutes (aka the same length as a network hour-long TV show), and it’s slight. Part of this is because it was somewhat unfinished — Renoir filmed the footage in 1936, was prevented from getting his last few scenes by bad weather, and then set it aside to work on other projects. In 1946, the producer decided to just put in those couple of transitional titles and release it. But the plan never was for it to be much more, the missing scenes would just have introduced the characters a little more naturally, and explained the time jump without a title card, allegedly.

So why is such a slight little film on the list? Because it’s atmospheric af, basically. The lingering shots of the river and the trees and the rain; the short, awkward courtship between the “responsible” dude and the daughter; and the kind of wistful longing of that last scene. It’s not a major work — there’s a reason The Rules of the Game is up in the top ten, and this is down at the bottom of the list — but it’s kind of a distilled version of those Before/After Midnight movies, in its way, and it’s easily worth 40 minutes of attention.