Director Jean Renoir’s entrancing first color feature—shot entirely on location in India—is a visual tour de force. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the holy Bengal River, around which their daily lives unfold. Enriched by Renoir’s subtle understanding and appreciation for India and its people, The River gracefully explores the fragile connections between transitory emotions and everlasting creation. —The Criterion Collection
The son of the painter Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir became one of France’s most important and respected filmmakers during the middle of the 20th century. A Philosophy and Math student, Renoir became a cavalryman, but was invalided out of the army before World War I. Later, he married a model and aspiring actress, and, following the death of his father and the acquisition of an inheritance, set up his own production company to produce movies for his wife. Renoir learned from these early experiences of financing movies and watching other films, and became a director in 1924. With the advent of sound, Renoir’s career was quickly made with a series of profitable films, including La Chienne (1931), a savage and dark drama about a man’s self-destruction, which was later remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street. Renoir’s subsequent films, including The Lower Depths (1936) and Grand Illusion (1937), were among the finest made in France before the war, and were well acknowledged at the time of… read more
This film shows not India but a very specific location in india, and that´s why it is so universal, but above all, as someone has said, the place is there to show the cinema, and not the contrary... They say "The river" is the most beautiful film ever made. I believe it.
Mr John: We should celebrate that a child died a child. That one escaped. We lock them in our schools, we teach them our stupid taboos, we catch them in our wars, we massacre the innocents. The world is for children. The real world. They climb trees and roll on the grass, close to the ants . . .
Não vou ao ponto de dizer que é o filme mais bonito do mundo - isto porque tenho a certeza de que não os vi todos - mas é, de certeza, a beleza "personificada" em filme.
Godden's Black Narcissus had been filmed to her dissatisfaction four years earlier by the Powell & Pressburger team so she was initially indifferent when Renoir approached her with a proposal to make a film version of The River. Thankfully she relented because Renoir made one of his greatest works and certainly one of the most beautiful Technicolor films of its era. A respectful, haunting and emotional masterpiece...
"As soon as you make a theory, facts destroy it."”– Jean Renoir Jean Renoir is not "elegant." Jean Renoir was never a "master." Though he
Um mundo culto em si mesmo.
Este foi o meu primeiro Renoir, seja pintado no quadro, na tela ou no ecrã. Na tela é o mais recomendável, dado que se tem maior noção da paleta… read review
Master director Jean Renoir shot The River (1951), his first color film, on location in India. It is a gentle coming-of-age tale set during the waning years of the British Raj. Criterion presents a… read review
It is very easy for a movie directed by a European about India to be pathetically condescending in its nature, coming in with the intention of unveiling some sort of truth about a foreign land to Western… read review