Come along for a Ride...

LobotomousMonk

The River is all about the construction of space and how people find their way through life. Filmed in India and in color, the spectator is immediately invited to the exotic. The title cards are imprinted into the diegetic world through scrolling long take, fusing the authorial voice with the fiction. There is a theme of auteurship in the story of The River that overtakes the superficial story of first love. The idea of first love is objective but the authorship is far from that. The portrayal of India is ethnographic but also biographical. The great depth of field serves a sense of pseudo-documentary. Identification is confounded somewhat through a lack of closeups. When there is a closeup, it is a two-shot. The adaptation beguiles an otherwise obvious example of the development of Renoir's famous stylistic system. Candid honesty is at the fore rendering the realism of group dynamics similar to Regle or M. Lange. However, the adaptation renders the literary directly to painterly while the authorship in voice-over narration retains a pure psychological focus on Harriet. Captain John is the object, that which provokes jealousy never has its own position elucidated. The voice-over narration gets intriguing as Harriet's character knows of events she was not present for. Harriet's diegetic character then narrates a story whose events are shown on-screen rendering multiple diegeses. When we believe we have returned to the first layer of diegetic, unpredictable events beg the question of whether we have slipped into a deeper secret layer and what connection they might all have to each other. The power of the authorship of Renoir and Godden combined subvert a political or even ethnographic study of the story. We are forced to submit to the coming-of-age-love-story alone. These self-reflexive characteristics have a strong connection to Renoir's Woman on the Beach. Again, many characters are underdeveloped highlighting the power of the authorial voice as a non-Transcendental 'Other'. According to Renoir, the universal element of the film was dance, however, I found its tableau framing to be inert in an unattractive way. Perhaps I am too much of a control freak to submit fully to a powerful authorial voice and as such The River is a film best left to those who love being taken along for a ride as opposed to those who must play at being a backseat driver. Of course, this statement has a deep irony in Renoir's own philosophy of the cork in the river.

score 8/10

LobotomousMonk 10 March 2013

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2765270/