We live in a time when matters riparian dominate the public consciousness. This inevitably leads to, at least in my case, an inner monologue on films set in and around rivers. We have discussed Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) in these pages earlier; so let those classics rest in peace. There are other examples. Jean Renoir’s The River (1951), based on Rumer Godden’s novel, is a gorgeous Technicolor look at the lives of English people living on the banks of the Bengal Ganges during the days of the Raj. Satyajit Ray aficionados will recall that it was during the shoot for The River that he met and became friends with Renoir. The majestic river ebbs and flows along with the series of Indian festivals that Renoir captures with the camera of his nephew Claude, who, amongst other films, went on to shoot two James Bond films, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979).
Besides Fitzcarraldo , Herzog’s other masterwork set on a river is of course Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), where a hardy bunch of conquistadors led by the manic Klaus Kinski travel up the Amazon in search of El Dorado, the city of gold. Herzog had a memorably fractious relationship with Kinski, and yet, after Aguirre ..., they worked on four more films together. In his autobiography Kinski Uncut, he writes: “Although I constantly try to keep out of his way, Herzog sticks to me like a s**thouse fly. The mere thought of his existence here in the wilderness turns my stomach. When I see him approaching in the distance, I yell at him to halt. I shout that he stinks. That he disgusts me. That I don’t want to listen to his bullshit. That I can’t stand him!” The book is full of such detail, some of it too lurid to be reproduced here.
On his part, Herzog captured his tempestuous relationship with Kinski in the documentary My Best Fiend (1999). While on rivers, it would be churlish not to mention The River Wild (1994). The director Curtis Hanson is best known for his masterwork L.A. Confidential (1997), but there are many pleasures to be had in this film where Meryl Streep is a rafting adept who encounters a pair of killers while on a white water expedition. John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) is another classic where four big city men canoe down a river and get into a nasty spat with yokels.
Coming to the river in the news, in Lokanath Rajaram’s H2O (2002) Upendra and Prabhu Deva vie for the affections of Priyanka. Her name in the film is Kaveri. Towards the end of the film, a wise old man asks them to solve the fate of a pair of conjoined twins, one of whom wants to live and the other to die, before deciding who gets the girl. The film concludes with a freeze frame with Upendra and Prabhu Deva seemingly about to attack each other followed by the inscription ‘The End. …?’
