The Great Movies III

To some degree, the girls are in love with Captain John because he is the only eligible man in their lives. No other characters appear or are discussed; that he is sad and detached they can overlook. Harriet impatiently wants to be old enough to be visible to Captain John. "I want to be outstandingly beautiful," she tells her pregnant mother. Harriet's narration is spoken by an adult voice; we understand these events take place around 1946.

Captain John has come to live in India, he tells the Anglo-Indian Melanie, because with one leg he feels like an outsider. "I'm a stranger wherever I go," he says, and she replies quietly, "Where will you find a country of one-legged men?" She is a stranger, too, because of her mixed race. "I don't know where you belong," her father tells her.

Certainly all of their lives stand apart from India; we never hear a conversation between Melanie and her Indian suitor, or between Bogey and his Indian playmate, and the nanny is limited to nannyisms; she is not even given the Indian title ayah by which all nannies were known. Scenes of the real India outside the compound are mostly in long shot.

The film is not constructed around high melodrama, but its deepest feelings are expressed when the two outsiders, Melanie and Captain John, speak with each other, almost in code. Melanie has an enchanted scene in which she tells a story about the meeting of Prince Krishna and his bride, named Radha. The actress Radha was a dancer, and her character's story leads into a dance scene that allows some of the color and mystery of Indian religion to enter the isolation of the British family's compound.

The River and Michael Powell's The Red Shoes are "the two most beautiful color films ever made," Martin Scorsese says in an interview on the new Criterion DVD of the restored print. I saw the movie for the first time when Scorsese's personal 35mm copy played at the Virginia Film Festival some years ago; when I mentioned it to him, he said, "I watch that film three times a year. Sometimes four." On the DVD, he says it reaches him more powerfully than Rules of the Game, considered Renoir's masterpiece. Some will agree, some will not. The River is like an Ozu film in the way it regards life without trying to wrest it into a plot. During the course of the year, the girls fall in love with the same unavailable man, there is a death and a birth, and the river continues to flow.

Renoir, son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, directed his first film in 1924 and was considered a grand master when he fled the Nazis and moved to Hollywood in 1941. There he worked with mixed success until, by the time he made The River, he was almost unemployable. The film was financed by an outsider, Kenneth McEldowney, a Hollywood florist who loved Godden's novel.

Renoir insisted on filming it on location in India, which he did with his nephew Claude Renoir as cameraman (and young Satyajit Ray as an assistant director). It was the first Technicolor film made in India. The budget was small. There were no stars, and some of the players had never acted before. Much of the atmosphere flows from Renoir's documentary footage, showing a bazaar, life along the river, annual festivals, boatmen at their work, and Hindus descending flights of stairs both grand and humble to bathe and pray in the water.

The British family lives apart from this India, and knows it. Behind the walls of their garden is a separate world, protected by the stern Sikh gatekeeper; only Bogey's young playmate climbs the walls. Together, the boys sneak out to the bazaar and watch a snake charmer, and Bogey finds another snake in the roots of the giant banyan tree right outside the garden-a tree whose roots fall down from the branches to reach for the ground, and among which gods and spirits are said to live.

There are subdued issues here involving colonialism and racism. Does Captain John shy away from romance with Melanie because she is not white? Is Harriet's father being paternalistic when he "loves" the sight of the laborers bearing their vast bundles of jute into the factory? The issues are there, but they are not called into focus, and the life Harriet shows us is the only one she knows.

The center of her world is a cubbyhole under the stairs, where she keeps her poetry and journals, and it is a betrayal when Valerie snatches away a notebook and reads Captain John some of the younger girl's love poems. India itself is on the brink of independence and partition, but Harriet is on the brink of adolescence, and that is much more important to her, as perhaps is natural.