This is one of my favourite pieces of writing, examining how two very different directors adapted the work of the same novelist.
In 1907, a little girl was born into a British family living in Bengal. The life she shared with her siblings was carefree – she didn’t go to school until the age of 12 – and, despite the almost complete absence of books in the house, she developed a fertile imagination. Stories poured out of her – adventures, lovers’ trysts. She’d even written her first autobiography – mostly fabricated – by the age of eight. She had no concept of the “Raj” and its impact on India until she was 18 and read A Passage To India. A silly, romantic girl. How was it that this same person wrote two novels that were to inspire two of the greatest films of the 20th century – Jean Renoir’s The River and Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus?
The answer, perhaps, lies in that very ignorance of the social structure around her as a child. Rumer Godden did not see herself as an English woman in India but as someone who belonged there. So when she came to write – in Black Narcissus, about a group of nuns setting up a remote convent in the Himalayas, in The River, about a young girl growing up in a colonial family – the stories were informed by a genuine curiosity for the Indian landscape and people and not by the petty prejudices of her peers. Ken McEldowney, ex-florist turned producer of The River, once spoke of how he came across Godden’s novel and related a conversation he’d shared with an Indian acquaintance who had told him that no westerner could ever see India through an Indian’s eyes. But the man went on to say that one foreigner had at least rendered India “accurately” through Western eyes – Rumer Godden.
So the films made of her work are buoyed up by an innate understanding of the world in which they’re set. But again this raises a question – why are they, then, so different? It’s hard to deny that Godden’s tales of romantic yearning are only a stone’s throw away from Mills and Boon territory, love stories dressed up in cloying prose. But from “a pallid novel,” as critic Gilbert Adair put it, “Powell and Pressburger produced an extraordinarily potent concoction of rampant exoticism, stylised settings and exquisite colours.” Black Narcissus is a film of delirious excess, fastening with delight on the growing hysteria of the nuns, on the three beautiful faces of Deborah Kerr, Kathleen Byron and Jean Simmons, and on Jack Cardiff’s Oscar-winning cinematography. The River is no less beautiful (it was Renoir’s first excursion into colour) but the camera is more patient in its gaze, happy to record the day-to-day working life and rituals of the people in a documentary-like manner. The rites-of-passage of the three adolescent protagonists are regarded with affection. This generosity of spirit extends towards the actors themselves who are hardly top-drawer but who fit their roles perfectly – the man playing the wooden-legged Captain John had himself lost a leg in the Second World War. And it’s a film we’re invited into – in the gorgeous opening credits sequence, the Indian symbol of greeting is painted on an earthen floor before we pan down the names of the cast and crew also daubed there. We hear the voice of a woman saying, “We welcome you to this motion picture”. As Tom Milne put it, with The River, “the magisterial lyricism and the warmth of Renoir’s humanity are the thing,” even to the point of it extending outwards from the screen.
Perhaps the best contrast that can be drawn between the two projects is in their treatment of death, which forms a pivotal moment in both dramas. In Black Narcissus, it comes after a duel between two warring sisters high on the cliff top above an impossibly deep chasm. Sister Ruth has by now been transformed into an avenging angel of hate. She emerges from the convent like an angry goddess, barely human, her eyes black against a shockingly pale face. The music rises in a furious chorus. The whole sequence is sent gleefully over-the-top before Sister Ruth plunges to her doom. But in The River, death comes quietly, in one of the single most poignant and haunting sequences in cinema history. We see the family asleep at the height of the afternoon sun – Mother on the verandah, Father slumped in his chair, the twins on the couch, their legs wrapped around each other. They are as one in their slumber, a universal portrait of life becalmed. Then Harriet realises her brother is missing – she finds him lying under a tree. He, too, is asleep, his body at rest, but it’s the sleep of death given by the bite of a cobra.
Of course, these variations in tone can be ascribed to the different personalities of the directors involved – Powell, the arch-fantasist of British cinema, and Renoir, the humanist who had once been the filmmaker of choice of the Popular Front. But in order to fully understand how these personalities make themselves manifest, we need to go back and look at their responses to that great subject - India. Powell made the extraordinary decision of filming the whole of Black Narcissus in and around Pinewood Studios (Rumer Godden horrified) but, in so doing, created a texture of conscious artifice and fantasy that perfectly complemented the nuns’ loosening grip on reality. Renoir, on the other hand, felt passionately that The River should be “abandoned” if it couldn’t be filmed on location and therefore capture the true spirit of the country (Rumer Godden delighted).
But it’s not just a different approach to visual texture that’s at stake here – it’s a whole position taken on the English experience in India. In choosing to idealise India from afar, Powell’s attitude unwittingly recalls the way the British kept themselves at arm’s length from the “natives” and holed themselves up in eyries like the resort of Simla, looking down on the overcrowded cities. Black Narcissus is set way up in the mountains in the clean air, but Renoir brings his film – both on and off-screen – down into the valleys where the ordinary people live and work. Curiously, though, while this position may seem more sympathetic to the Indian, Renoir makes no comment on English colonialism, nor does he criticise the white family at the centre of the story. If there is a political point to his film, it’s simply that all his characters are rendered equal – as he famously declared, “Everyone has his reasons”.
Black Narcissus, however, is far more subversive. Godden has admitted that the original novel written in 1939 was produced in a spirit of mild rebellion against British rule. And she could not have chosen more apt subject matter – the attempt to Christianise India through missionaries was one of the great failures of the Raj. As Niall Ferguson notes in Empire, the religious zealots that poured out of England like a plague of locusts in the 18th and 19th centuries not only drew up a miserable tally of converts but actively caused religious tension as the local populations held on tenaciously to their own faiths. Powell opens his film with the long, low blast of horns from a Buddhist monastery echoing across the vast, empty spaces. This eternal sound, present in the area long before the nuns start their hymns, sets the pattern for a film in which the nearby Holy Man (wittily revealed as an ex-British Army officer who has returned to his roots) stays put through the hardships of the climate while the nuns are forced to move on. The village children (essential forces of anarchic innocence in both films) laugh at the nuns’ teaching and even undermine it. In one brilliantly-written scene, they are heard reciting the words “gun, battleship…” – an ironic comment on English education, if ever there was one – before shifting imperceptibly to “peony, daffodil…” Even the youngsters show up the essential vulgarity of the British system.
Such missionaries as these nuns were held in especial contempt, though, by the resident colonial rulers. The Englishmen who had settled in India were primarily interested in trade and knew that religious dogma could be a nuisance, if not worse. Thoroughly acclimatised themselves, they saw these new immigrants as inexperienced and naïve. The nuns’ agent, played by David Farrar, represents this social class. He treats the Mother Superior, Sister Clodagh, with derision and tells her at the start of the film that, with India, “you either let it take you over or ignore it.” In fact, he has done both, having given up on any idea of meaningful interaction with the natives but, at the same time, surrendering to their culture – the idol of a Hindu god can be seen nestling in his room. He counterbalances the nuns’ ambition, but together, they provide a rich portrait of an empire in decay.
In his sympathy with the local religion, Farrar’s character could almost be a version of Godden herself, who admitted a long-term fascination with Hinduism. Most importantly, she was intrigued by the eroticism that lay behind its key myths. This is why her preoccupation with burgeoning female sexuality is not just that of a dreamy romantic – she saw it as a means to express the power of the indigenous culture allegorically. It’s pointed out to the nuns that the place they are converting into a nunnery used to be the potentate’s brothel – it’s that air that they are breathing. And their star pupil, the young Indian general, is lured away from his lessons by the charm of a peasant girl he meets in the brothel’s central hall. In short, just as the nuns have tried to form a Puritan institution in a building once given over to sexual freedom, so the British have tried to create a dominion in a world utterly antithetical to their nature.
Ultimately, the sisters are unable to cope with the feelings the surrounding landscape stirs within them. They are left bewildered and defeated, Black Narcissus preserving the sense of India as a world of ineffable mystery. It’s telling that Renoir found the country one of the “least mysterious” that he’d encountered, enjoying a rapport with its people and sensing a kinship with his own countrymen. He said that he came to understand it best through dance – the scene where Radha performs at her wedding is the most sensitively directed and visually stunning sequence in the film. Intriguingly, Powell also has Jean Simmons dance in the convent hall, but it is not a choreographed routine and is merely introduced to telegraph to the audience her free spirit. Radha, however, was a priestess in real life and her performance is unashamedly Indian in style and tempo. Renoir withdraws his camera to a respectful distance, frames her whole body in long shot and lets the performance play out, with no attempt to compromise its integrity and make it less foreign, more intelligible to western eyes. It’s in the directness of this gaze that we finally understand the differences between The River and Black Narcissus. Powell was an Englishman, with the same limitations of insight as his compatriots, but also with an acute awareness of their imperial follies. Renoir was a disinterested outsider – his only concern was people. Powell saw hysteria and breakdown in India. Renoir saw a girl who was wholly Indian but whose movement and expression spoke to us all.