River River

* * * * Australian Documentrary | 75MINS | COMPLETED

A journey from source to sea, River is a cinematic and musical odyssey that explores the remarkable relationship between humans and rivers.

Following up 2017's film odyssey Mountain, filmmaker Jennifer Peedom and narrator Willem Dafoe reunite with the Australian Chamber Orchestra for another cinematic experience depicting humanity's relationship to rivers.

Official Trailer

Review

Review by SANDRA HALL | smh.com.au

River does not request your attention. It demands your surrender. Flowing against the current of today's commercial moviemaking, it's out to slow the pulse rate and induce a trancelike state of reflection .

" I set out to inspire wonder,'' says its writer-director Jennifer Peedom, who has form in this department. River is the second part of her proposed trilogy about the natural world, and while it lacks the vertiginous drama of Mountain (2017), her first film in the series, it's just as spectacular. Footage filmed by drones and satellites take you so far above the earth that its recurring patterns, laid out like a succession of abstract paintings, invite you to interpret them as a single grand design. Given an extra dimension by the music of Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the earth's topography takes on a rhythm of its own.

The orchestra also collaborated with Peedom on Mountain, as did the film's narrator Willem Dafoe, who charts the images' sinuous progress as they wind their way over 39 countries on six continents.

Sounding as if he's embarking on an alternative version of Genesis, he begins: " When the first rains fell, the earth awakened. Where rivers wandered, life could flourish .'' Then comes the wake-up call: " There is scarcely a river unspanned, undammed or undiverted. The sheer scale of the human project has begun to overwhelm the world's rivers.''

Peedom and her producers say that they didn't set out to turn the film into a call for action, but it became unavoidable as they learnt more about the damage done to the rivers by human industry. Fortunately, however, the polemics are introduced only after you've had a chance to drink in the romantic glories of gushing torrents, fastflowing streams and the glassy surfaces of resting rivers at sunset.

Then, gradually - thanks to the skilful work of the editor, Simon Njoo - the beauty reveals its paradoxical side. You have a moment to appreciate the aesthetics of a gorgeously composed scene of the funeral pyres at Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges before you inevitably start to dwell on the poisoning of the river. And you're given another moment to be struck by the power of a towering dam wall in Washington State. Then Dafoe comes up with a daunting statistic: " The grandest dams have impounded so much water that they have slowed the rotation of the earth.''

Dams are both blessing and curse, we are told, supplying us with the fresh water while preventing the rivers' silt, with all its nutrients, from reaching the wetlands and flood plains where it's most needed. Then, putting himself at severe risk of stating the obvious, Dafoe goes on to say that more often than not, those upstream dictate the water's direction, which means that need and greed upstream spell disaster downstream.

The script is by the British author and academic Robert Macfarlane, whose books are concentrated on the natural world and our responses to it. This is his second collaboration with Peedom. The script for Mountain was successfully drawn from his book, Mountains of the Mind but this time, there's a straining for significance which dulls the impact of both the words and the images.

Tognetti's score, a blend of old and new, is more effective - a delicate balancing act which succeeds in complementing the cinematography, without upstaging it.

Original music melds into Bach and the Varanasi sequence is accompanied by a piece called Water by Radiohead's guitarist, Jonny Greenwood.

And the Aboriginal singer and didgeridoo player William Barton, another ACO collaborator, was called upon for an improvised chant to go with a sequence devoted to the intimate role of rivers in Indigenous history.

It's a hypnotic experience - and an audacious one - given the film's stately pace and scorn for action, suspense and all the other conventional narrative devices.

But it's put together with such a finely tuned instinct for the sensuous power of the earth's splendours that it's very seductive.

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