Review of Ganga (1960) by Thomas M — 15 May 2009

Jean Renoir is one of my favorite filmmakers, I especially love the films The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion, both excellent looks class and war respectively. This film was made a good ten years after both and was his first color film. The film is in English (though it was not made in Hollywood) and was filmed in India. It?s told from the perspective of a British girl of about twelve or thirteen living with her family in colonial India next to the titular river (The Ganges). The film follows a fairly standard coming of age formula, the girl is infatuated with the wounded American war veteran who has moved in next door even though he is clearly more interested in her older sister. The plot isn?t really what the focus is here, the focus is really more on the backdrop of the river, which is a symbol for the stream of life which is juxtaposed with the trivialities of this day to day life.

The film?s color photography is beautiful, it has that three strip Technicolor look to it that reminded me of the look of Powell and Presburger?s films. The setting must have felt very exotic to audiences at the time. The view of India is very much from the perspective of the colonial outsider and it often glosses over the social realities of the Indian people. It?s not the most politically interested film, and that is a surprise given Renoir?s previous examinations of class and poverty earlier in his career. I thought the acting was pretty weak during a lot of it, the main character has a lot of typical child actress weaknesses, and Thomas E. Breen is also pretty weak in the film (he was a non-actor).

I wasn?t particularly impressed by it outside of it?s technical aspects for most of the running time, but a funny thing happened somewhere in the third act? I began to care about the characters, a lot. I really started to worry about their fates and by the end I really wanted to keep watching these people.