A Film Canon

As both Renoir's first Technicolour film, and the transition between his sojourn in Hollywood and return to Europe, The River translates the peculiar detachment that characterises his earlier French works into a series of spectacles that are so intense as to gradually deindividuate the characters and events around which they revolve, thereby offering cinema's answer to Hinduism as an ecology of colour, in ostensible flux, but actually possessed of a deep, cyclic continuity that is encapsulated in the (relatively) restricted palette, which encompasses all the browns between deep red and deep green. From this perspective, the narrative trajectory is less a matter of people -  specifically, the three girls that fall in love with a mysterious ex-soldier, in colonial India - as of mystical natural objects - specifically, a giant pipal tree and the river itself - or, alternatively, only allows the former to exist insofar as they are identified with the latter, whether literally, as in a little boy's tragic encounter with a cobra in the roots of the tree, and his sister's subsequent attempt to drown herself, or figuratively, as in the unusual accolade paid to the ex-soldier: "His face is like a sensitive plant." This tends to break down the distinction between coloniser and colonised, reducing each subject to a mere fragment - or, alternatively, stressing the fragmented nature of each subject, as evinced in a series of marked absences (eyes, legs, parents, lovers) - inextricably bound up in a cycle that it can only glimpse, and which precludes the exoticism of previous Indian topoi, replacing their military fringe, and the gore that it engenders, with a far more documentary aesthetic; or, rather, with Renoir's own documentary aesthetic, whose detachment always feels proportionate to the perceived sophistication of its subject, and which, despite deflecting the voyeuristic impulse into the romantic narrative, takes care to elide those moments that could prove too emotionally or viscerally manipulative, clearest in the depiction of the little boy's death.