La Fille de l'Eau [is] an almost involuntary expression of several themes destined to preoccupy Renoir throughout his career…. Despite the coy story-titles, Renoir manages to lend the opening scenes considerable authenticity and persuasion, both in his economical portraits of the Raynal family—upstanding, college-boy son, rigidly puritanical mother, anonymous, bourgeois father preoccupied with his new car—and of the village itself, with its big house and courtyard, the surrounding farmland, the trees, rain-clouds, bridle-path, canal and barge. The film was shot on location, and in its feeling for café interiors, wooded exteriors, poachers, tramps, gipsies, rabbits and horses, cows lazing in the running water, one discovers exactly the same river-of-life metaphor which pulsates through Boudu, Partie de Campagne, Swamp Water, The Southerner, The River and Déjeuner sur l'herbe. (pp. 131-32)

Though the hero is rather a dull stick, or tends to become so in a trilby...