RENOIR’S ‘THE RIVER’ AT THE NUART

To see Jean Renoir’s “The River” again (at the Nuart Wednesday through Saturday), which is in its first theatrical release in 35 years, is to realize that his vision of humanity’s relationship to nature is crucial in bringing unity to a slender, occasionally awkward coming-of-age tale. In lesser hands it surely would have seemed weighed down by travelogue-type footage and an overly generous amount of offscreen narration representing the voice of the film’s adolescent English heroine (Patricia Walters).

Walters, whose beautiful, well-meaning mother (Nora Swinburne) tells her she has an “interesting little face, full of character,” lives in Bengal with her family in a fine old mansion near a river. (They live in a style so grand and serene you would never have guessed that India had only recently undergone the wrenching turmoil of the assassination of Gandhi, independence from Britain and bloody partition.)

In the foreground, “The River” tells of the impact of a pleasant-looking young American visitor (Thomas Breen) upon Walters, her older, glamorous friend (Adrienne Corri) and Breen’s half-caste cousin (Radha), who is struggling to come to terms with her identity just as Breen is with the loss of his leg during World War II.

In the background is the river itself and the daily activities of the natives who live in such harmony with it. Renoir masterfully converges his two focal points when tragedy strikes and the river emerges as a symbol of eternal cycle of life and death.

A fresh Technicolor print brings out all the vibrant beauty of Claude Renoir’s cinematography. In its way, “The River” is a tremendously influential film because among those observing its making was a young advertising executive who was inspired and encouraged by Renoir to become a film maker himself. His name is Satyajit Ray, the first Indian director of international renown. Information: (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.

A Frenchman of a more recent generation, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jean-Luc Godard’s onetime collaborator, attempts to come to terms with his 10 years in America in his thoroughly unique and delightful “Routine Pleasures.” (at UCLA Melnitz Tuesday at 8 p.m.). It is an imaginative attempt to probe the American spirit by discovering connections between the film criticism and the strong, direct collage paintings of Manny Farber and the activities of a model railroad club in Del Mar, where both Farber and Gorin reside. Gorin finds it significant that Farber is a carpenter by trade and that his theories of “termite art”--i.e., the artist just keeps drilling away until he’s devoured his subject--have parallels with the obsessive, modest, painstaking tasks of the model railroaders, who’ve managed to keep the past alive in the present.

“Routine Pleasures” is a celebration of craftsmanship as art--whether it be that of Hawks, Wellman, Cagney, Farber or the anonymous, all-American guys who make up the model railroaders club. It is also Gorin’s acknowledgment that in some ways the American spirit will forever elude him, no matter how well he has captured it on film. Information: (213) 825-2581.

Hodjakuli Narliyev’s “Fraggi Deprived of Happiness” (1985), Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz, and Assya Suleyeva’s “My Home in the Green Hills” (1986), Saturday and Sunday at 5 p.m., the two films available for preview in this week’s offerings in UCLA’s “Salute to the Soviet Republics,” are not among the series’ stronger offerings.

The first is a lengthy, hard-to-follow epic-scale treatment of the young manhood of an 18th-Century Turkmenian poet and philosopher (played by Annasaid Annamuradov) that is a lament both for the cruelty of warfare, as our hero observes the failure of tribal peoples to unite in the face of a common enemy, and the loss of his true love to an arranged marriage. “Fraggi Deprived of Happiness,” a meticulous, heady period piece of much pastel beauty, plunges us into a brutal world in which masculine pride, tradition and superstition dictate the course of power struggles and political intrigue. The second is a sweet but tedious kiddie comedy about a little Kazakhstan shepherd boy (Sanzhar Jaksylykov) adjusting to school in the city.