Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe share the same title, nothing more. Importantly, Renoir’s picnics, there are two of them, are comic jabs at Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, which does not have a picnic.
According to Huxley, scientific rationalism defeats human passion, but Renoir rejects rationalism. Renoir makes his point by upending a traditional picnic celebrating the engagement of the sexless Professor Étienne Alexis, advocate of artificial reproduction, to cold-hearted Marie-Charlotte, an advocate of chastity. Intentionally, the couple has chosen to make their announcement in the vicinity of a ruined temple of Diana, goddess of chastity. Matters proceed as planned until the temple’s current occupant, Gaspard, a gnarly Pan-like shepherd, maliciously conjures a Mistral. As the wind blows, so decorum is turned topsy-turvy as the picnickers’ primal passions are released. Uncharacteristically, the otherwise passionless picnickers embrace, grope, and kiss.
Alexis and Marie-Charlotte are separated amidst the chaos. Wandering alone, Alexis finds Nénette, a young buxom peasant woman, naked and swimming in a river. Trying to be discreet, he’s about to turn away when Gaspard plays his panpipes again. Enchanted, Alexis’s repressed sexuality is revived. They make love.
Afterwards, they picnic with other young couples. Sitting on a riverbank, Alexis joyfully picnics with Nanette and her friends as a natural fact of life.
When he is separated from Nénette, Alexis is temporarily restored to his programmed “scientific rational” self and plans to marry Marie-Charlotte. But learning that Nénette is pregnant, he chucks Marie-Charlotte and marries Nénette. Rationality is no match for sensuality.
Food consequential.
See: Jean Renoir. Picnic on the Grass [Le déjeuner sur l’herbe] (1959). Screenplay by Jean Renoir; Aldous Huxley. Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932