BASED on an autobiographical novel by Rumer Godden, The River (1951), directed by Jean Renoir, is one of the most beautiful movies ever made. Renoir, son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and director of classics like The Rules of the Game and The Grand Illusion, was congenitally incapable of making anything ugly. Add to this the fact that in The River, Renoir was deploying Technicolor (for the first time) and using its palette to capture the bright colours and lush greenery of India, and the rest of the equation falls into place. The artist, the medium and the location combine, to produce an experience of surpassing loveliness. Proof can be found starting August 3 at New York’s Lincoln Center, which will show a restored print in connection with the release of a transfer of The River on DVD. Renoir’s tale is not especially dramatic. It is an unassuming, understated coming-of-age story related mostly through the voice-over narration of Harriet (played as a child by Patricia Walters), the bookish eldest daughter of a large, warm family of English colonials living in a picturesque corner of Bengal. Harriet’s Edenic childhood is complicated by the arrival of Captain John, an American who lost a leg in the war and who comes to visit his eccentric English cousin Mr John. Harriet is not the only local girl to fall for the visitor, played by the Hollywood-handsome Thomas E Breen. John’s half-Indian daughter, Melanie (Radha Shri Ram), seems to carry a torch for him, though she already has a high-caste Indian suitor. Harriet’s more serious rival is a strapping redhead named Valerie (Adrienne Corri), only child of the owner of the jute factory that Harriet’s father manages, who throws herself in Captain John’s path whenever she has the chance. AO Scott on a movie that showcased India without tigers, elephants and Bengal Lancers The loss of Harriet’s innocence is neither an epiphany nor a catastrophe, and to the extent that The River is her story, it has the charming, old-fashioned appeal of classic adolescent literature. Godden’s book was published in 1946, a year before British rule over the Indian subcontinent ended. Renoir shot his film in 1950, the year India became a republic. Between the two was a bloody process of partition and strife that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced many more, and left in its wake two nations in a state of permanent hostility. None of this is evident in The River, which casts its glance on the placid days of the Raj. Godden, recalling her own girlhood, sets her veiled memoir in the 1920s, while Renoir does not specify when the film takes place. It is possible, therefore, to criticise The River as another exercise in colonialist nostalgia, in which petty emotional dramas of privileged white people unfold against an exotic backdrop where darker faces are just another aspect of the scenery. But such criticism sticks neither to Godden, who wrote matter-of-factly from the perspective of her own life, nor to Renoir, who knew little about India before the film. After a review in The New Yorker piqued his curiosity, Renoir, who had spent most of the 1940s struggling in Hollywood, tried in vain to interest an American studio in Godden’s book. He found little appetite for a movie about India without “tigers, elephants and Bengal Lancers.” He told his eventual co-producer, Kenneth McEldowney, that he would pursue the project only if he could shoot it on location, and he found a rich local pool of talent and wisdom, including Satyajit Ray. The removal of politics to the margins allows Renoir to establish contact with the deeper rhythms of life. His narrative moves in a straight line, but it also registers the cyclical, endless movement of experience through time. Which may be another way of saying that The River, which required months of Renoir’s life and asks a little more than 90 minutes of yours, is timeless. New York Times News Service
