The River is a film about first love, and by extension, original sin. It,s essentially a myth about ever - repeating rites of passage from childhood to adulthood. First love, says the narrator, is the same in any place, but the flavour of this story is Indian. The setting is colonial Bengal and the Ganges river permeates this story, in which India and it,s natural beauty is used, at least superficially, a kind of Garden of Eden.

The film right away presents the difficulty : The Garden of Eden was perfect, but if we never left it, none of us would exist.

Children are slowly leaving childhood in this film, and young girls are trying to learn about motherhood, about what it means to give a body to a man, in order to, with all the physical and emotional pain it brings, bring about the next generation.

"I hate bodies", says Harriet, the protagonist and narrator. She narrates the film as an older woman, but in the story we see her as a teenage girl in love with an American veteran who has shown up at the neighbor,s house. The American survived the war, but he lost one leg, and he feels uprooted no matter where he is.

She and her many sisters, as well as her beautiful friend Valerie (who is like an older sister) fall in love with the American stranger, and Valerie and Harriet start to plot their romances, with or without his consent.

In Harriet,s large family , there is only one boy, Boggy. The boy has complete disregard for what he ought to be. He doesnt want to learn to read or write. He only wants to be with the snake and to charm it with the flute as the old Indian man in the bazaar.

Children, born exactly into whatever mix of cultures, religions and beliefs happen to surround them, only later learn to grapple with their roots and the question of where they belong -- in other words, where and how to start their own families.

The River is a visually beautiful film about the universality of myth --about stories that repeat themselves again and again, and bring dramatic changes to individual lives, while maintaining the balance of the natural world.


Alexandra Atiya
ImagineIndia Film Festival