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Critics reviews

THE RIVER

Jean Renoir France, 1951
Renoir took a coming-of-age memoir and peeled back so much incident and plot that what remains is more reverie than narrative, leaving time to linger on faces and landscapes and the ever flowing Ganges. The emblematic images for me are a montage of naps which Renoir zooms in on with swaying drowsiness, aping the drift into unconsciousness. The film as a whole has the same kind of lulling effect, and if you lock into its tempo the screen will drop away..., revealing eternal verities.
August 1, 2017
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In a project that relies so heavily on young and non-professional actors, Renoir's knack for handling and editing performance becomes self-evident. Framed right, their awkwardness becomes characterization and depth. The result is a work of careful construction, with moments of graceful lyricism and subtle tragedy, which seems to move as elegantly and mysteriously as rivers do.
April 22, 2015
In effect, Renoir humanizes India, but does so with ethnographic curiosity by relying too heavily on its cultural specificities for mere visual detail, instead of affording a multitude of perspectives. Although the film's titular river is expressed as being complicated and polymorphous, the narrative remains restricted to an unquestionably limited valence, in which even Indian physical expression via a prolonged dance sequence is rendered through fantasy and myth.
April 21, 2015
It's a film that flows. It's a film that is circular. The river flows on, the seasons cycle, we have spring, we have birth, we have death. We have the death of childhood, the birth of womanhood. We have the re-birth of Dr. John (which seems incomplete, and that's appropriate, because life isn't neat), and we have the awakening of Melanie. But there is no resolution. Nothing is "settled" at the end, because that's not how life is. That's not how Renoir saw life.
October 12, 2013
Acceptance of misfortune or circumstances denotes maturity - an attitude depicted as inherent to Indian culture but something westerners must learn - and this philosophy is embodied in the image of the river. But it's only when you see the film on the big screen that the metaphor becomes clear.
January 1, 2010
There are writers about film whose views I respect who prefer Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947) to The River. I have followed their analyses, and struggled to find something to love in the former film, without success. But I love The River. For me, it is one of the "most beautiful films" (1), member of that special category of movie loves Godard created half a century ago, and which only now am I finding the courage to use.
March 10, 2009
Vinyl Is Heavy
Don't know what kept me from fully embracing this the first time I watched it, but, boy, this sure is a loveably lazy movie; that is, it's patient and seemingly aleatory; that is, it flows irregardless of forces; that is, it goes, onward, always, like life.
January 1, 2009
Godden's story and narration are thick with clichéd exotica, and 21st-century viewers can be forgiven for being perturbed by the Euro-white condescension and pre-feminist ickiness on display. It may be minor Renoir in the end, but all considerations wither in the shadow of his optimistic humanism, an indomitable sensibility dedicated to the warm bounce and emotional intercourse of love-born relationships.
July 26, 2005
Melanie's struggle with her identity not only speaks to her specific situation, but also to the general confusion of teenagers as they (for lack of a better phrase) come of age. Interestingly, Melanie's character does not appear in the Godden novel, but was added by Renoir, who wanted a non-colonialist voice to be heard in his film. In presenting such universal dilemmas onscreen, the director has once again succeeded in shaping a film that seems certain to resonate for years to come.
March 28, 2005
Guided by Rumer Godden's autobiographical novel, [Renoir] rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical film set beside a tributary of the Ganges, whose success would launch a new era of portraying India on screen... Just what an extraordinary achievement The River was should not be underestimated, especially considering the time and difficulty of its production in the late forties...
February 28, 2005
Similar to the quaint dirt road in Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy, the river provides a source of constancy and reassurance throughout the profound changes transpiring in Harriet's young life. Inevitably, like the reflective, mature Harriet, the river becomes an omniscient chronicler of the enrapturing beauty and universal celebration of the process of life.
January 1, 2001
Jean Renoir's 1951 masterpiece, his first film in color... Renoir's images flow with the same still motion as his metaphorical river: entering or leaving the frame is a matter of life and death, but in the end it is the same. For Andre Bazin, this was the Rules of the Game of Renoir's postwar period, a film in which "the screen no longer exists; there is nothing but reality.
January 1, 1980