In his unfinished 1946 drama, A Day in the Country, director Jean Renoir films a story of bucolic idyll where a young man and woman are marked by unrequited. Set by the lazy banks of a river, Renoir uses that setting as a symbol of the flow of life and the moment of first love, with loss of innocence the part of the journey on which he focuses. In his appropriately titled 1951 drama The River, the director uses Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel as his source material to once again explore a body of water as a symbol for the trajectory of life.
Though aspects of the film may feel quaint to a modern audience, the fact that Renoir filmed The River on location in India, rather than a set, was quite revolutionary for its time. His objective: to make “a film about India without elephants and tiger hunts.” The majority of films about the sub-continent up to that time were romanticized adventures that focused on its exoticism, filmed through the lens of British occupation. Yes, Renoir’s film also features mainly Anglo protagonists, but the India in The River feels realistic, mainly because the director chose non-professional extras, real people doing real things.
In the film, Godden’s alter ego Harriet (Patricia Walters) is the daughter of a jute factory manager who finds herself falling in love with a crippled American soldier, Captain John (Thomas Breen), who comes to stay with the family living next door. However, her best friend Valerie (Adrienne Cori), an older and more attractive girl, also has designs on the American who lost his leg in an unspecified war. While staying with his cousin, also Harriet’s neighbor and a British widower, Captain John falls for his cousin’s mixed-race daughter Melanie (Radha). But in many ways, the love triangle (or is it a square?) is not really what Renoir is driving at here.
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Much of the film also focuses on the traditions of the Indian people surrounding the British protagonists. While Harriet’s family does employ an Indian nanny and staff, much of the rest are filmed with the eye of a documentarian. Harriet and her family may take part in the Hindu rituals portrayed in the film, but they are simply swept up in the magic as observers, just like the viewer. Narrated by Harriet from a later point in the time, her fascination with the Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali, is the real core of the film, as Renoir traces the belief that she cycles from ruin to rebirth, symbolized by the river that flows through the center of his movie.
Renoir combines this spirituality with the existential search of his main character. Harriet knows she is a somewhat plain girl. Even her mother attempts to change the subject when the girl asks if she is beautiful. Seeking validation from the wounded soldier, a man who is much too old for her and also not emotionally available, Harriet is navigating the jump from an idyllic girlhood into the beginnings of adulthood. While she doesn’t lose her virginity like the girl in A Day in the Country, Harriet begins to realize that the affairs of the heart are more complicated than the stories in her books.
If anything, Renoir and The River are responsible for Satyajit Ray’s masterful Apu trilogy. The nascent director served as an advisor to Renoir. But according to film historian Ian Christie, The River is a “touchstone for a certain kind of modernity in cinema,” citing its self-conscious, reflective nature. There may be snake charmers and cobras, but a major character pays a harsh penalty for seeing India as a magical place with the tigers and elephants Renoir so carefully set out to avoid. Most of all, The River is a film about a dying regime in the waning days of its power. It makes sense that Ray made Pather Panchali just a few years later, wresting control of the Indian film industry away from the imperialists, just like Gandhi helped his countrymen do with India itself a decade earlier.
