Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

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.

william-t-archer The River is Renoir's India film, and among the many other directors he influenced, you can see here his abiding impact on the great Satyajit Ray. Renoir follows a British family living in India, and brings his usual appreciation of human flaws and desires to bear on the situation. If the movie doesn't really rank as one of his best works (I would put it far below Grand Illusion or Rules of the Game, for instance), this might be because, leaving Europe, Ray seems to lose some of his sureness of touch, particularly in the scenes with the Indian characters. I always think of a Satyajit Ray film like the glorious Devi as brilliantly capturing what Renoir missed -- as simultaneously paying tribute to Renoir and showing the rich complexity of Indian life that Renoir, as an outsider, didn't quite manage to capture. This isn't a put-down of Renoir -- more an appreciation of how far-reaching his influence has been, and how he has opened up a remarkably wide range of possibilities for other directors, who remain fond of him even when they surpass him. Along these lines, it's especially worth noting that Ray worked on The River and scouted locations for the film. He also told Renoir about his plans for his first film, to be based on Pather Panchali, and Renoir encouraged him to go forward and become a director. Really, Renoir is one of those rare directors who, the more you learn about him as a person, the more you like him.

Claudio Carvalho In Bengal, India, the teenager Harriet (Patricia Walters) is the oldest daughter of a British family composed by her father (Esmond Knight) that lost one eye in the war and is the manager of a jute factory; her mother (Nora Swinburne) that is pregnant; and her four younger sisters and one little brother. They have a quiet and comfortable life living in a big house nearby the Ganges River. Valerie (Adrienne Corri) is the teenage daughter the owner of the jute factory where Harriet's father works that spends most of her time with Harriet. Melanie is the British-Indian daughter of Harriet's neighbor Mr. John (Arthur Shields) that has just returned from an education in England. When the young American Captain John (Thomas E. Breen) that lost one of his legs in the war comes to Bengal to visit his cousin Mr. John, the three teenagers fall in love for him. "The River" is a story of first love in the exotic India and metaphorically compares the Ganges River with the flow of life with the lead character leaving her childhood and becoming an adolescent. The screenplay of this romance has many beautiful quotes, but excessive narrative from a grown-up Harriet. The cinematography is stunning, with the use of bright colors in the environment of India. Thomas E. Breen performs an outcast character that has a great complex due to the loss of one of his legs but he does not transmit this feeling to the audience. The red-haired Adrienne Corri is a very beautiful young woman that gives credibility to her sixteen year-old character. The Brazilian DVD was released by Continental Distributor. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "O Rio Sagrado" ("The Sacred River")

Camoo Wow. What a special film this was! On the surface so basic but underneath a deeply spiritual and satisfying adventure... I cannot say enough about the color, and the process used, something Martin Scorsese talks about in length during an interview on the Criterion disc. To him, along with the Red Shoes, this is the most beautiful color film ever made, and I would have to agree with him. A shot of an orange tree stands out in my mind towards the end, it sways in the wind against a bright blue background, and it gave me goosebumps all over my body. The film plays very much like a dream, beneath somewhat mediocre acting and story, but I won't get into that, because I didn't feel as though that mattered as much as the overall feeling and purpose the film left with me afterwards... Some people I was with really didn't respond to it the way I did, but I think you have to enjoy it on a different level or it has the potential to fail, but when I saw it I found it a great, great masterpiece, better than any other Renoir film I have ever seen (I know Rules of the Game is considered his greatest, but that doesn't stand next to this at all in my mind). See it also for the beautiful cinematography of the culture of India during colonial rule, which has all but transformed by now.