The River

A Wonderful Movie Of Great Humanity By Jean Renoir
This is a movie of great calm and humanity, which moves at its own rhythms. It's also a beautiful movie, shot in India by one of the great visual directors of our time. The story may seem simple on the surface, but it moves deeply into the currents of life, using India and the Ganges as metaphor. I can only say that the movie is an affecting look at how life goes on and how we grow within our lives.

The River tells its story through three girls on the brink of adulthood. Harriet, the daughter of the English manager of a jute mill on the banks of the Ganges; Radha, the daughter of their English neighbor whose mother was Indian; and Valerie, the daughter of a wealthy English couple whom we never meet. The three are close friends but each is dealing with with their changes in their own way. Then one day the American cousin of their neighbor arrives to stay for awhile. He lost his leg in the war and is handsome. All the girls develop feelings for him and suddenly their own...

Jean Renoir's visual poem, in Technicolor
Jean Renoir, after spending almost a decade in Hollywood struggling to establish an independent filmmaker staus, went to India. As it must have been for Renoir himself, THE RIVER is a breath of fresh air to its audience, which still holds a singular unique place in cinema.

Based on Rummer Godden's autobiographical novel on her childhood spend on the bank of the Gandhis River, the film explores a radically poetic narrative which depends neither on a plot, nor driven with strong characters. It is really a visual poem. It doesn't "describe" anything, in preference to capture (as well as to create) a certain atmosphere, in eccense a whole universe of a certain life, beeing "felt".

Though its aim was radical, and so were the mise-en-scene strategies taken by Renoir which were very unusual back then and even so today --especially the use of colors, that Renoir with his art director Eugene Lourie often walked around the sets and locations with cans of paint--, the film...

Renoir's River of Life is a Masterpiece on the Human Condition
On the surface, Jean Renoir's film "The River" is a docu-drama on India and its people, replete with temples, religious festivals and cultural practices, set amidst the backdrop of the Bengal River. Scratch the surface and "The River" becomes a metaphor on the meaning of life, or at least the Hindu concept of it -- a cycle of births and deaths.

Several scenes allude to this theme. For instance, the statue of Hindu goddess Kali, symbolising creation and destruction, is moulded from the river's clay and returns to clay when it is submerged in the river after devotees complete a ritual celebration. Mr. John (Arthur Shields) at one point philosophises on life with his American cousin, Capt. John (Thomas E. Breen), stating one man jumps from the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge while another goes on his way across the bridge. When young Bogey (Richard Foster), Harriet's brother, dies from a cobra's bite a sibling is born some months after his death.

Between birth and...

Click to Editorial Reviews