A nice rave from the NYTimes - and an opportunity for lucky New Yorkers to see this on the big screen.
India Without Tigers
By A. O. SCOTT
BASED on an autobiographical novel by Rumer Godden, "The River" (1951), directed by Jean Renoir, is one of the most beautiful movies ever made. This is not so much a critical judgment as the recognition of a mathematical truth. Renoir, the son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the director of such universally acknowledged classics as "The Rules of the Game" and "The Grand Illusion," was congenitally incapable of making anything ugly. Even his lesser efforts are distinguished by a precise and lively aesthetic sense - an eye for fluid, pleasing compositions and an attentiveness to the audience's pleasure. 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 colors and lush greenery of India, and the rest of the equation falls into place. The artist, the medium and the location combine, as though effortlessly, to produce an experience of surpassing loveliness. Proof can be found starting Aug. 3 at Lincoln Center, which will be showing a restored print in connection with the Criterion Collection's release of a beautiful transfer of "The River" on DVD.
Of course, as with any great movie, the experience of "The River" and the reality behind it turn out to be more complex than they may appear, though part of the film's beauty surely lies in its straightforward simplicity. The tale Renoir chooses to tell 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, one of many nonprofessionals in the cast), 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 recent war and who comes to visit his eccentric English cousin, Mr. John (Arthur Shields). Harriet is not the only local girl to fall for the visitor, played by the Hollywood-handsome Thomas E. Breen. Mr. John's half-Indian daughter, Melanie (Radha), seems also to be carrying a torch for him, though she has a high-caste Indian suitor of her own. 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. This romantic intrigue is more Louisa May Alcott than Jane Austen, and the interplay of story and setting suggests few of the psychosexual and political undertones E. M. Forster detected in "A Passage to India." 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 an independent republic. Between the book and the film was a bloody process of parturition, partition and strife that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced many times more, and that left in its wake two nations, India and Pakistan, in a state of permanent hostility.
None of this is evident in "The River," which seems to cast its glance backward on the placid days of the Raj. Godden, recalling her own girlhood, sets her veiled memoir in the 1920's, while Renoir does not specify exactly when the film takes place. It is possible, therefore, to criticize "The River" as yet another exercise in colonialist nostalgia, in which the 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 he started shooting. In a short talking-head film included on the DVD of "The River," Renoir (who died in 1979) remarks that "India is one of the least mysterious countries," a statement that may reveal more about the director, for whom nothing human was ever alien, than about the country. After a review in The New Yorker piqued his curiosity, Renoir, who had spent most of the 1940's 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, went on to become India's greatest realist filmmaker.
The result of Renoir's long immersion in Bengal is a picture that embeds its story within a rich documentary context. This is not just a matter of authentic detail, of seeing the overgrown temples, the bustling markets and the river itself as they really are. India is the most active, complex character in the film, and the Western characters exist to bring its personality into sharper relief, rather than vice versa. Renoir, like his father, was an artist of the open air, and each of his frames implies a world that extends beyond the screen. His camera moves at a strolling pace, turning this way and that to take in new details, and it becomes the instrument of his endless, generous curiosity. This curiosity leads Renoir to attend to the nuances and peculiarities of human behavior and, at the same time, to illuminate the larger patterns of custom and belief that allow people to understand what they do.
The name most commonly given to this approach - a word that has attached itself to Renoir's reputation like a loyal, friendly dog - is humanism. While the term accurately reflects the ethical dimensions of Renoir's work - his essential faith in human decency and his sympathy for human weakness - it does not quite do justice to his sensuality, his sense of theater or his love of nature. And the discreet removal of politics to the margins of "The River" allows him to establish contact with the deeper rhythms of life. His narrative moves in a straight line, but it also registers, as few other English-language films have, 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.
