[The Lower Depths (Les Bas-Fonds), The Diary of a Chambermaid, and Picnic on the Grass] possess an incredible richness of idea and imagination, partly because of their strangeness. If Renoir's art were wholly a function of its thematic complexity … I'd have to put them among the glories of his career. But I am not persuaded that such complexity is always greatness, though it is a great boon to essay writers, or that there is so much foolishness in the vulgar common view that celebrates Renoir the populist realist or the nature-loving son of his famous father. That view isn't false; it is merely incomplete. (p. 22)

Renoir's realism follows several different lines. Some of it belongs to the classic realist preoccupations of, say, The Southerner or Toni. But more of it seems to grow out of an appreciation of the kind of "realism" your parents had in mind when they'd tell you to be realistic and maybe forget the nonsense you picked up at the movies…. (pp. 22-3)

But by the time of Picnic on the Grass, natural realism is being regularly subject to the apocalyptic rigors of a supernatural magic. (p. 23)

Everybody in The Lower Depths has a special point of view. For the Baron, life is a dream—of repeatedly changing his clothes. For the flop house landlord Kostilev …, half sniveling piety and half harsh brutality, it is a peak up to heaven and a hard cold stare down to the ground. For the flop house whore, it is romantic love. But for Kostilev's young wife it is only sex and money. For Pepel it is an inherited occupation (burglary), until it changes temporarily to murder, when he leads his comrades in the slaughter of the evil Kostilev, and then to the undefined realm of potentiality that is the particular value of a life on the road.

But the defined realms that precede the ending are of a fascinating sort. (p. 24)

The Lower Depths world isn't continuous. It is stratified, sharply delimited between foreground and background….

This isn't great or even very good filmmaking…. But it is Renoir feeling out a territory that will become increasingly important in his movies: a humanized segment of nature ordered in degrees of wildness….

You can find it everywhere in Diary of a Chambermaid…. The film has won a certain notoriety from the fact that all this outdoors is so palpably indoors…. Diary seemed to signal a theatrical Renoir—not simply a Renoir attracted to the metaphor of theatre (true of every film at least from Nana, 1926, on)—but a Renoir for whom the open exploitation of theatrical artifice in setting and performance could open a whole new kind of vitality….

Diary of a Chambermaid is a film shot through with death, even more than Grand Illusion, and you can never tell in Renoir when any cliché may open into mysterious depths….

By the kind of paradox that informs each of these Renoir movies, Diary of a Chambermaid—Hollywood sound stage, aquarium light and all—is virtually a study in the meaning of "ground," or earth, where things are hidden and from which they are able to grow. (p. 25)

Picnic on the Grass comes as close as any of the movies to satisfying the chip-off-the-Impressionist-painter's-block view of Renoir…. Pretty clearly Renoir is creating a "Renoir," one of his few, and for that reason among others Picnic belongs among the most consciously artificial of his works. It is also among the most ingeniously intellectual, and if a mechanical awkwardness attends all its lyrical tribute to ripeness and the powers of generation, that is perhaps because the grass is teeming with notions about where we are going and where we are. (pp. 25-6)

Like most pastorals, the subject of Picnic on the Grass is really political; a struggle between sane politics and crazy, between man and test tube, between sex and sterility, appetite and abstinence. Like most recreations of nature, the film's interest really is in artifice. And perhaps like most celebrations of leisure, its ideal really is work…. Like pornography, it is voyeuristic, obsessed, not too concerned with the larger humanity of its human beings. It leaves that concern to its intellectual sub-structure, which is almost endless in its ramifications. (p. 26)

Rules of the Game is rational comedy turned sour. Picnic on the Grass is romantic comedy turned to ecstasy. Among the major Renoir films it stands alone in proposing a happy ending based on social involvement rather than withdrawal or escape. And among the films we are examining, it is the only one to look forward to a just society without first killing some repressive power that inhibits it. It doesn't need death. Revolution has become evolution—a shift in terms not atypical of Renoir, for whom, it turns out, they apparently mean the same thing.

Clearly, both Diary of a Chambermaid and Picnic on the Grass redefine the concerns of Rules of the Game, a film that remains seminal not so much because it is the best, but because it is the best defined of Renoir's studies of house and garden, servants and masters, mixed alliances, interior and exterior space….

Renoir is the most consistent of filmmakers, not in producing a steady succession of masterpieces, but in continually developing, re-examining, rediscovering the same basic materials…. In Rules of the Game, it is a place for irresolution, disguise, and secret assignation. In Picnic on the Grass, it is a genuine mystery, opening the way to a real change of heart and mind. In Lower Depths, it is the bottom, from which one or two can rise again. But in Diary of a Chambermaid it is a surface layer, covering buried treasures, buried bodies, and some seeds of a new life….

As [Renoir's later films] leave behind the concerns of social politics they become more profoundly political. Striving for a degree of improvisatory freedom, they often seem more calculated. Depth of field gives way to an over-seeing fluidity, and the great houses lose their potency as architectural metaphors….

In some ways the late movies gain through their preoccupations; in other ways they lose. The later Renoir is perhaps more valuable to think about; the earlier Renoir is more fun to see. (p. 27)