Like that of Orson Welles, his only American counterpart and greatest student Jean Renoir had a career that can be divided roughly into three phases: Nationalist, Exile, and Internationalist. The trajectory that these two principle Western humanists of the cinema shared was a gradual enlarging of the national identity that was so important to their respective first decades or so as filmmakers (Le Crime de M. Lange being as vital an aspect of Thirties France as Citizen Kane was to Forties America) into something that encompassed and drew on the entire world for its subject and looked to it for its audience. In this age of watered-down Global Hollywood that may not seem so novel, but that phrase usually means turning the world into Americans, while these men were for their various reasons attempting to flee the tyranny of Hollywood. Renoir famously called Welles “a citizen of the screen,” but what does that mean if not a citizen of the world, and does it not apply as much to himself?

It is serendipitous, then, that Criterion has happened to release Welles’s key Internationalist period work (F For Fake, discussed elsewhere in this Reverse Shot) at the same time they’ve brought out Renoir’s The River—in recent years the most neglected and hardest to see of his great films. The River forms a precise axis between the Exile of his American years—in which most of his completed pictures were removed from his control and his more personal projects never got off the ground— and the multilingual and multinational casts of his later years. In fact, Renoir’s involvement with the picture started as an attempt to woo his way back into the studios with what he considered a salable property: Rumer Godden’s tender autobiographical coming-of-age novel about a British family living in Bengal, India. As the story goes (one of those unbelievable coincidences that always seem to happen to charmed figures like Welles and Renoir), Hollywood wasn’t interested in a Renoir film about India that didn’t include elephants or tiger hunts, but a florist named Kenneth McEldowney, who had moneyed connections in India and was looking to produce a film on the subcontinent, happened to be seeking the film rights to Godden’s novel around the same time only to discover they belonged to Renoir!

Serendipitous too that a florist—a laughable background for a film producer until you think of how much he must have understood about color—should be the catalyst for Renoir’s first color film, and even the first Technicolor feature ever shot in India. The circumstances of The River’s production are so full of these firsts and improbabilities—like the fact that a young Satyajit Ray served as Renoir’s assistant—that one can scarcely believe the film really exists. It gives an aura of the legendary to a film that modestly seeks to portray only the everyday, the familiar, and the unchanging, but by doing so to make contact with the eternal. It’s a unique collaboration between Renoir, Godden, and Mother India herself—not the newly politically independent India or the vestiges of colonization that remained but the land and its people who the narrator says have remained unchanged for thousands of years. The story, while remaining largely faithful to Godden’s novel, in a sense completes Renoir’s “unfinished” A Day in the Country of 15 years earlier: another bourgeois family, another river, another young woman’s romantic initiation and acceptance of the grand tragedies and casual disappointments of life. What The River adds in spectacular, vivid color is the backdrop of Bengal. Renoir never seeks to exoticize it nor deny that exoticism might be the Westerner’s only possible response. Mainly, he keeps from repeating what he saw as the underlying cause of Indian hostility to the British: “It was not because they had conquered them, but because they ignored them” as he wrote in his autobiography. Renoir looks at India through the lens of a gentle, inquisitive, appreciative, and accepting foreigner—which of course he was.

Criterion’s disc is a bit skimpy on the supplements that The River probably deserves—certainly it’s lighter than the other Renoir titles they’ve covered thus far. But the stunning image quality, from a newly restored print along with the usual digital cleanup, goes a long way toward making up for the lack of a long doc about the film (though one is included about Godden) or a commentary track. Besides, this is one of those great films that isn’t deceptively simple but truly simple, making most attempts to intelligently discuss it seem awfully unnecessary next to the pure act of experiencing it. This is also the rare case of a major restoration being made available on DVD before the expected limited theatrical release makes its rounds. (The River was one of the spotlighted restorations at this year’s Cannes.) It’s a treat, to be sure, but let’s also hope it’s not an indicator that theatrical presentation may become an optional afterthought for important revivals.
—ERIK SYNGLE