"Rich and poor, young and old..."

jzappa

Renoir eschews the India of extraordinary adventure and marvel for a contemplative, in effect spiritual film taking place by a channel of the Ganges, whose achievement would project a fresh time period of portraying India on screen. And I love it when a foreign filmmaker's hand comes through in an English-language production, a 1951 Western-made film about a whole other culture and philosophy, truly fascinating us with it.

If something is visualized, it's not vocally expressed, and if it's vocally expressed, it's not visualized. The very dry voice-over narration is complemented by self-explanatory images and scenes: The narrator's voice engraves the story in the past, distilled by recollection, sustaining a pondering intricacy that just showing the events could not achieve, resonating not only youth but on India and the Indian sensibility of concurrence with the world that had ensnared Renoir and that gives the film a circular, continual feel. This reflective narration allows the braiding of the life of Patricia Walters' protagonist Harriet and the life of India, so that the sights and sounds of India, such as the beautiful montage of intimate, innocent shots of Indian river people 45 minutes in, may hold sway over our viewing of the film while Harriet remains its functioning core.

The mere allusion of courtship among Melanie and the white American, Captain John, confronted ethnic thou-shalt-nots on both sides of the Atlantic. And the character endows an Indian apart from a serf with a genuine expression and distinctive quality of character in the film's focal footlights. Not that the film's point of view is as simple as it might seem. Its groundwork is source writer Rumer Godden's own pre-1920 background with India, with her young representation, Harriet, falling in love with an out-of-commission GI of undetermined warfare and the entirety chronicled with romantic recollection by an older Harriet, who has, naturally, become a writer.

Again, as with Grand Illusion, Renoir debunks man-made borders and boundaries. "Everyone has his reasons" is the adage most regularly related to Renoir's output collectively, citing his understanding of opposing perspectives and his defiance to sermonize or condemn. The film's two fathers, Harriet's jute factory manager and Melanie's widower father, Mr. John, are both overwrought by their fatherly duties. "In the West, we've learned it's easier to grow children rather than keep them," one of them wryly remarks. The manager has a wife, who tolerantly describes the inevitable troubles of being a kid, a teenager and a parent. The Indian nanny is loved because she is a fiery child herself. Mr. John distresses over the mixed- race situation his marriage to an Indian has begotten for the twenty-ish, mix-blooded character of Melanie and over the post-traumatic disorientation of his cousin, as he works to come to terms with having lost a leg in the war.

Compared to the competition and strife fixed on by Hollywood formula, which inevitably concludes with closure, Renoir's films aim to say that not all issues are resolvable. None of the central figures here find actual contentment. Rather, they rise above resentment and dashed hopes in a succession of events that we can maybe see as cathartic but that are likeweise shaped by the outlook of Hinduism. The Europeans who are the main protagonists of this almost Unitarian Universalist coming-of-age drama engage in the Hindu rituals as onlookers instead of followers. But when their hardest experience comes, they espouse some of the articles of Hindu ritual and much of its sobriety. One element of Hindu theology in particular appears to captivate Renoir, the goddess Kali's seasonal course from devastation to resurrection, and this could be seen as the film's all-embracing keynote.

score 8/10

jzappa 11 September 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2125353/