The River (1951) DVD9 and Blu-Ray Criterion Collection, 2 x Blu-Ray BFI
on November 30th, 2021 at 16:05
Director Jean Renoir's gentle, meditative The River (1951) looks at British colonial life in India through the eyes of a young girl. An idyllic portrait emerges, of life along the Ganges River, where 12-year-old Harriet (Patricia Walters) is the oldest in a brood of five siblings that includes a brother and four sisters who roam and play in their exotic family compound. Harriet's father (Esmond Knight) is the British owner of a jute factory in Bengal, her mother (Nora Swinburne) a content wife and mother, and the center of the children's lives their lively nanny Nan (Suprova Mukerjee).
Mixing the ethnographic feel of Robert Flaherty's documentaries and poignant coming-of-age drama, the film is a thoughtful examination of life's flow seen through Harriet's experiences with first love as a prelude to maturity. The River is given its lush, poetic tone by its narrator Harriet who falls in love with a handsome war veteran and visitor (Thomas E. Breen) to India. Harriet is joined in her adoration by a beautiful friend Valerie (Adrienne Corri) and her Eurasian neighbor Melanie (Radha Shri Ram). The arrival of this handsome stranger stirs passions in girls, signalling the death of childhood and the dawn of their womanhood.
Martin Scorsese once named this film the most beautiful color film ever made.
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