Watching Jean Renoir's film The River (1951) is like watching a picture book come to life — a picture book of the young Harriet's girlhood days, spent in Bengal in the early years of the twentieth century. Growing up by the river, Harriet and her siblings lead a carefree life that is caught by Renoir's camera in a way that is reminiscent of Impressionist paintings. Indeed, the film could be described as one long painting that faithfully records the flow of life. As the flow of the mighty river mingles with the flow of life, the film places events in perspective.
This was Renoir's first colour film, and the first technicolor film to be shot in India. Satyajit Ray, not yet known to the world, was somebody whose counsel Renoir largely valued, during the making of the film. Based on an autobiographical 1946 novel by Rumer Godden, The River intertwines Harriet's life with the larger life around her — the latter shot by Renoir as documentary footage on a riparian lifestyle.
Harriet and her friend Valerie playing in the lush green garden; Harriet's naughty little brother Bogey transfixed by the cobra in the pipal tree, which will sadly be his undoing; Harriet's father going to and from the jute factory; the pensive Mr. John next door, with his half-Indian half-English daughter, Melanie (played by Radha Sri Ram before she became Radha Burnier, the famous theosophist), and their new guest — the young American, Captain John; a rather Christmassy Diwali party at Harriet's place that is exciting because Captain John, the war hero with one leg, is attending — the subjectivity of this world is interspersed with the life around that is shaped by the flowing of the river on whose banks people eke out a living.
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Life simmers by the river, and the everyday comes alive under Renoir's photographic eye: boatmen tug at their oars; bazaars sell colourful wares; fortune-tellers jostle with the crowds; babies with kohl-lined eyes look on; and holy men meditate. Days come and go, the seasons change, the festivals follow one another — and life goes by as the perennial river does, in one broad, majestic sweep, a force that cannot be paused.
As the earthen idol of Kali becomes earth once again, only to come alive the following year, so does the cycle of birth and death form the basis of life, which plays out without beginning or end. As Valerie comments on life, “I didn't want it to change, and it's changed.”
This stoicism seems to come much more naturally to the half-Indian Melanie than to the westerners, all of who have to work hard at accepting the inevitable. Considering that the character of Melanie was not in the book, and was an invention for the screen, one wonders if Renoir, as part of the West's Orientalist discourse — that Orientals are natural mystics —inevitably equated her Indianness with an innate Eastern wisdom. When Melanie's father worries about the future of his half-caste daughter and tells her that perhaps she “should never have been born,” Melanie, with philosophical confidence, retorts: “But I am born. Someday I shall find where I belong.” Melanie, for Renoir, represents the unfathomable wisdom of the Orient.
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The film's music elevates; to put it metaphorically, the soul glides off the boughs of the film's magnificent pipal tree. The blotch of Bogey's untimely death gives way to riotous springtime. It is Holi, and there is hope yet again in the form of a newborn, Harriet's latest sibling, an entity now present in the world, but who did not exist awhile back — while the river, uninterrupted, continues to flow.