“The Blind Owl” - Raoul Ruiz (1987)

The Blind Owl (La Chouette Aveugle, 1987) is a French film by noted Chilean director Raoul Ruiz.  The prolific Ruiz (1941-2011), who directed more than 100 films in his career, fled Chile in 1973 after the coup d'état led by dictator Augusto Pinochet and settled in Paris, where he became something of a cult figure among the intellectual cineastes there.  Ruiz’s preference for making low-budget, but intellectually complicated and obscure, films suited their tastes, and in fact he once said that he liked to make films that

“would have to be seen many times, like objects in the house, like a painting. They have to have a minimum of complexity.” [1].

And certainly The Blind Owl is a good example of Ruiz’s penchant for obscurity. 

The film was loosely based on Sadegh Hedayat’s famous Iranian novella Boof-e Koor (The Blind Owl, 1936), which itself is dark and cryptic.  But Ruiz complicated things further by only adapting certain parts of Hedayat’s work and by also incorporating elements from the 1624 Spanish drama El Condenado por Desconfiado (Damned for Despair) by Tirso de Molina (Gabriel Téllez) and by introducing his own ambiguities.  The result is almost a game of complexity, and this will only appeal to the tastes of some viewers.  In fact noted French film critic Luc Moullet, who did like the film, remarked that

“I’ve now seen The Blind Owl seven times, and I know a little less about it with each viewing.” [2]

(There was an earlier, Iranian-made film of Hedayat’s novella that was directed by Kiumars Derambakhsh, Boof-e Koor (1975), and which was more faithful to Hedayat’s original text.  See also my review of another Iranian film based on a Hedayat story – Dash Akol (1971), directed by Masoud Kimiai. [3])

In fact I don’t believe that Ruiz’s film of the story even has a coherent plot, and instead it offers merely a sequence of suggestive fragments that were inspired by Hedayat and that point to the complexities of human experience at the existential level.  In this respect, even though the film only very loosely follows Hedayat’s novella, it might be best to begin our discussion there.

Hedayat’s work starts with what apparently is a horrific nightmare of a man who is visited one evening by a dark and beautiful woman.  She silently enters his room and gets into his bed, but before long the man notices that she is dead.  For obscure reasons he cuts her corpse up into pieces that he puts into a trunk and then meets an eery and repulsive old man who may be his uncle and who offers to help the man bury the trunk.  All of this is told by a narrator whose obsessive and repetitive phraseology suggest that he is insane.

In the second part of Hedayat’s work, the narrator, still obsessed but here immersed in an ordinary world, talks more about his tortured married life with a woman he loves but calls “the whore”.  She sleeps with a wide variety of lowlifes but won’t let him even kiss her on the cheek. 

The weird and ambiguous plot elements of Hedayat’s Boof-e Koor have induced a wide variety of interpretations, some associated with social issues at the time (the novella was published in Bombay in 1936 when Hedayat spent a year there, and it was banned in Iran).  But I would say that the core themes underlying the tale are far more elemental and lie at the heart of human existence – inner guilt, fear of death, and loneliness.  Hedayat conjures up these feelings with constant references to acrid tastes and smells and repugnant images of decay and deterioration.  These innate concerns are overlain with the deep mysteries of life that are somehow mysteriously embodied by woman.  And this is all connected with the horror of having one’s core, essential personhood rejected (when the rejection is by a woman, the denial is more fundamental) and its associations with the fear of annihilation.  In short, there is a pervasive ambience of fear, anxiety, and depression, but also of a compulsive attraction (to the feminine mystery).  An example of Hedayat’s imagery concerning the feminine mystery is the following passage, which refers to the narrator’s mother [4]:

“They were slanting, Turkoman eyes of supernatural, intoxicating radiance which at once frightened and attracted, as though they had looked upon terrible, transcendental things which it was given to no one but her to see.  Her cheekbones were prominent and her forehead high. Her eyebrows were slender and met in the middle. Her lips were full and half-open as though they had broken away only a moment before from a long, passionate kiss and were not yet sated.  Her face, pale as the moon, was framed in the mass of her black, disheveled hair and one strand clung to her temple.  The fineness of her limbs and the ethereal unconstraint of her movements marked her as one who was not fated to live long in this world.  No one but a Hindu temple dancer could have possessed her harmonious grace of movement.”

Hedayat’s expression of these themes predate Sartre’s La Nausée (1939) and Camus’s L’Etranger (1942), but they lie at the core of Existentialist artistic concerns (and may have even directly inspired later authors).  Ruiz, I would say, drew inspiration from Hedayat’s existentialist themes and used his plot elements only as instruments to create his own cinematic form.

In this film by Ruiz, there are also two parts, but their connectedness and coherence is even more mysterious than in Hedayat’s novella.  In particular Ruiz introduces and extends complications associated with the mixture of identities – sometimes the identities of separate characters in the story are merged or mixed.  Things are even more complicated by the fact that there is a mixture of multilingual and multicultural overlays involving French, Spanish, and Arab (hence Muslim) cultures. 

The first part of the film is directly inspired by the first part of Hedayat’s novella and involves a nondescript young Frenchman (whom, for brevity, we will refer to as the “hero”) getting a job as a projectionist at a Parisian movie theater that shows Arabic-language films.  He works with a mysterious and sullen co-projectionist, Kassem, who hides his disfigured face by always wearing a balaclava that covers everything but his eyes and mouth.  Both the hero and Kassem have boarding rooms at the cinema, so they spend much of their time there.  Kassem’s beautiful girlfriend, Fatima, is also shown, and she has some friendly interactions with the hero.

The hero almost never watches the Arabic language films that he projects, but on one occasion when he happens to glance at the screen, he becomes transfixed by the sight of a beautiful and scantily-clad court dancer.  This woman later emerges from the film and comes to the hero’s room, gets into his bed, and silently dies – similar to the sequence in Hedayat’s story.  Also gruesomely following Hedayat’s narrative, the hero cuts her body into pieces, and with the help of an old man who appears and claims to be his uncle, puts the body pieces into a trunk and looks for a way to bury the corpse.  They eventually manage to cast the trunk into the river, but there are later disturbing images of the girl’s body parts floating in the stream.

The second part of the film moves further towards an immersion into the Arabic films that are being projected at the theater and that are apparently set in Cordoba Spain. There are two intermingled narrative threads in this section – one concerning a man whose job it is to behead sinners (not a part of Hedayat's story), and another thread about twin brothers who are madly in love with the court dancer (this second thread is derived from Hedayat’s tale). 

As the story progresses, there is further mixing of the outer story and the film-within-a-film elements.  There are also further identity mergings and confusions:

• Fatima and the court dancer seem to merge identities at some points
• The hero,’s alleged nephew, whose identity also appears in the film-within-a-film, at times merges his identity with that of the hero.
• The hero’s identity also sometimes merges with that of his nasty old uncle.

All of these identity interminglings may remind us that our personal identities are essentially known to us only by the narratives we naturally construct about our experiences during the course of our lives.  We also intuitively construct narratives about the people we encounter, and these identities are, since they are our own constructions, also secondary parts of our own identity.  So Ruiz seems to be suggesting that these identity constructions can sometimes be mixed and confused within us.  We never really know who we truly our, and we only cling to these self-constructed narrative fragments to identify ourselves and others. 

However, I don’t entirely go along with the above, somewhat intellectual, assessment.  I think we always have some existential (i.e. phenomenologically primordial) certainty about our own conscious identity and our sense of personal autonomy.  This sense of personal identity is more fundamental than the schemata we construct that structures what we know about ourselves.  Nevertheless, these narrative notions are tied to the film’s ultimate message or experience.

The fundamental problem with this film is that the overall narrative scheme is not compelling.  The individual narrative fragments, though sometimes bloody and gruesome, don’t come together  into an intuitive and unifying narrative journey.  This problem contrasts with Hedayat’s tale, which does have a hypnotic narrative continuity.  We enter into the narrator’s consciousness in Hedayat’s story, but we don’t get into a sympathetic or empathic relationship with Ruiz’s hero.  The hero in Ruiz’s film is relatively passive, and I was unable to develop any feeling for what the hero wanted – his external world is there, but his internal feelings, desires, and directions are blocked from  us.

There are scattered fascinating images, though, and these seemed to be enough for Luc Moullet [2]:

"And rarely has a film’s ending provided such a succession or simultaneity of contradictory elements – mixing the extremes of pessimism and joy – or a summit quite so bewitching and extravagant. This finale is part of what makes The Blind Owl French cinema’s most beautiful jewel of the past decade.”

Not having yet, myself, seen the film seven times, though, I have, despite its fascinating inspiration, much more moderate feelings about its overall virtues.
★★½

Notes:

1. Carole Ann Klonarides, “Raul Ruiz”, BOMB Magazine (Winter, 1991).    
2. Luc Moullet, “The Blind Owl”, (excerpted from Trafic, no. 18, Spring 1996), Rouge Press (English translation, 2004).   
3. The Film Sufi, "’Dash Akol’ - Masoud Kimiai (1971)”, The Film Sufi, (12 April 2017).   
4. Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl (1937/1957), (English translation by D. P. Costello),  Grove Press, New York, pp. 26-27.

"Dash Akol" - Masoud Kimiai (1971)

Iranian writer-director Masoud Kimiai has had a productive and continually active fifty-year career, but his most prominent and well-received work came relatively early on.  One of those early successes was Dash Akol (1971), which concerns love, honor, and survival among street toughs in the Iranian urban environment of an earlier period.  It is based on the short story “Dash Akol” (1932) [1,2] by Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951), who is one of my favorite writers. 

Now considered one of the major Iranian literary figures of the 20th century, Hedayat spent his early adulthood studying European literature, and during his tragically shortened literary career he introduced a number of Western motifs and perspectives into Iranian settings. As a result, his writing covered a range of styles, and some of his most famous works, besides “Dash Akol”, include "The Benefits of Vegetarianism” (1927), “Three Drops of Blood” (1932), The Blind Owl (1937), "Don Juan of Karaj" (1942), and “The Dark Room” (1942) [3,4].  To me, though, Hedayat’s very best work has an unforgettably macabre flavor, and he is essentially the Edgar Allen Poe (who was in fact one of Hedayat’s models) of Iranian fiction.  His principal characters are often beset with extreme loneliness and inexpressible existential fears, including fears of these same characters’ own self-destructive impulses.  In these Hedayat stories, the world itself is frequently ominous and unknowably misshapen. 

So one of the virtues of a Hedayat story is the eerie mood that the story evokes.  And it is a credit to Kimiai that he managed to conjure of Hedayat’s prose-induced mood of “Dash Akol” with his cinematic presentation of the story.  This was accomplished partly by means of many shadow-laden scenes in deep focus.  In addition, the emphatic and melodramatic music of Esfandiar Monfaredzadeh, the style of which is not normally to my taste, is effective here in sustaining the brooding and expressionistic mood that overhangs the story.

The world in which the story “Dash Akol” is set concerns the almost lawless and anarchic urban environments of an earlier day.  In such settings in 19th century Iran (Qajar period), there arose the notion of the luti, who was essentially a street thug and who sought to be the “boss” of his neighborhood. A luti was an uneducated lower-class hooligan who heavily drank alcohol, engaged in promiscuous and exploitative sex, and generally bullied anyone in the neighborhood who didn’t bow down to his belligerent dominance. Respect and fearful obsequiousness was what the luti constantly demanded from all others of his class.

During the same Qajar period there emerged also the countervailing notion of the lutigar, which was something of a chivalrous knight dedicated to helping the poor and protecting the weak from exploitation. Patrolling the neighborhood with his identifying tassel and his sheathed sword, the lutigar would be always ready to come to the aid of oppressed or disadvantaged people.  Those who were lutigar (aka javanmardi or fotvvat) followed principles of generosity and courageous self-sacrifice and were considered to be pahlavan (heroes) in their neighborhoods.  (Note that the notions of luti and lutigar have a much older ancestry, but the present-day understandings of these terms seem to have crystallized in the 19th century [5,6,7]).  Of course the boundaries between a lutigar and ordinary lutis may not always be clear.  But in Dash Akol, it is clearly the case that Dash Akol is an honorable lutigar, while his antagonist, Kaka Rostam, is just a despicable luti.

Masoud Kimiai’s script for Dash Akol follows Hedayat’s story pretty closely, but Kimiai did introduce some changes that I think were enhancements to the overall narrative and which I will identify below.  The story is somewhat episodic but passes through three main sections.

1.  Dash Akol, the most honorable man in Shiraz

The opening sequences show the street thug Kaka Rostam (played by Bahman Mofid) in a teahouse and boastfully claiming to be the boss of Shiraz.   While Kaka is bullying a serving boy, Dash Akol (Behrouz Vossoughi) arrives carrying his signature caged parrot and challenges Kaka.  They immediately get into a sword fight that results in Dash Akol getting the upper hand. But rather than killing Kaka, Dash Akol lets him go with a humiliating warning.  This of course is a major loss of face for Kaka.

Then a messenger arrives summoning Dash Akol to the lavish residence of Hadji Samad, a respected and reverent man who is now on his deathbed.  Saying there is noone more honorable than Dash Akol, Samad announces that Dash Akol is to be the executor of his estate.  Dash Akol doesn’t want to take on the burden of such a task, but his honor forces him to accept the responsibility.

At Hadji Samad’s funeral, one of the many grieving women in full, face-covering chadors almost faints; and Dash Akol is summoned to sprinkle some water on her face to revive her. When her facial veil is lifted for a moment, Dash Akol looks into her eyes and is stunned by her beauty. This young woman, Marjan (Mary Apick), we later learn, is Hadji Samad’s 14-year-old daughter.  When she walks away, Dash Akol picks up the black hand scarf she had dropped and puts it in his pocket.

2.  The Estate Executor
Dash Akol assumes the role of the estate executor, but he becomes depressed because he has fallen madly in love with Marjan.  He knows that he is more than twenty years older than the girl and below her class.  In addition, he feels that his many facial scars from past blade fights make him too ugly to win a pretty girl’s love.

The scene now shifts to a wine house that features musicians and a beautiful dancer, Aghdass (Shahrzad).  A thuggish patron starts bullying Aghdass, but Dash Akol, who is also there, chases the thug away. Aghdass clearly likes Dash Akol and dances for him, but Dash Akol is too drunk and sorrowful to respond to her, even spurning her invitation to come to her room.  She tells him that “when a man is sorrowful, he is an ocean of sadness.”

Kimiai’s script has two significant changes to Hedayat’s story here. The dancing girl, Aghdass, is not in Hedayat’s original story, but including her has the effect of adding substance and contrast to the romantic theme. In the original story Dash Akol has romantic dreams of Marjan.  That element has been omitted in the film and replaced by the more upfront presentation of two contrasting forms of femininity. Mary Apick, an Armenian Iranian actress with refined beauty who plays Marjan, has an almost ethereal image to her. Shahrzad, who plays Aghdass, is more physical and earthy. Kimiai captures this by focussing on the sensual movements of Shahrzad’s hands and feet as she dances. In particular, there is something inexpressibly visceral about the image of human feet, and here it serves to connect the viewer with Aghdass.

Another change that Kimiai made concerns the wine house proprietor, Isaac.  In Hedayat’s story he is sneeringly portrayed as a slimy Jew, reflecting Hedayat’s apparently prejudicial tendency to look down on any Semitic influences on pure Persian culture.  In the film, though, Isaac is portrayed as a sympathetic and helpful person.

The rest of this sequence shows Dash Akol diligently attending to the estate he is managing.  His honorable reserve prevents him from interacting with his beloved Marjan.  But there is one atmospheric shot showing him on one of Shiraz’s rare snowy days looking down from an upper-level window on Marjan in the estate compound courtyard as she marvels at the snow.  To drown his sorrows over Marjan, Dash Akol spends his time drinking araq (a high-proof alcoholic liquor) and pouring out his broken heart to his parrot.

In the original story, seven years are said to pass while Dash Akol spends his time managing the estate and brooding over his impossible love. In the film, this passage of time is not so evident, but it is clear that Dash Akol’s withdrawal from the street culture has emboldened his enemy Kaka to boastfully claim that Dash Akol is chicken and has become a mere servant in the Hadji Samad compound.

3.   Marjan’s Wedding
Eventually Marjan’s mother receives a marriage proposal for her daughter’s hand from a handsome young man of a prosperous family.  Dash Akol feels honor-bound to accept the proposal when Marjan’s mother consults with him. In Hedayat’s story the marriage proposal comes from a man said to be older and uglier than Dash Akol, but Kimiai’s change here in the story also seems appropriate in terms of romantic tragedy.

Rather than attend the wedding, the depressed Dash Akol goes to the wine house and gets drunk. Aghdass approaches him and finally declares her passionate love for him.  She drags the inebriated Dash Akol to her room, and they spend the night making love.  Their scenes of lovemaking are intercut with Marjan and her new husband going to bed on their wedding night.

That night on the way home, the still drunk Dash Akol runs into Kaka and his gangsters, who proceed to rough up the sorrowful Dash Akol.  Finally Dash Akol challenges Kaka to a final battle to be held in front of everyone at the city square.  Dash Akol then goes home to prepare for the sword fight, working out at the local zurkhane (house of strength).  The lonely man also speaks to his only confidante, his parrot, rhetorically saying to it that it is his love for her that has killed him.

The battle in the city square finally takes place, and the epic struggle in the shadows of various arcades occupies more than five minutes of screen time.   Dash Akol finally gets the advantage, but as a man of honor, he throws down his sword and lets Kaka go.  He turns his back on his adversary, telling him, “I told you I never kill dogs.”  Kaka picks up his sword and fatally stabs Dash Akol, who with his last remaining strength strangles Kaka.

On his deathbed later, Dash Akol tells Isaac to give his only possession, his parrot, to Marjan.  The next day the parrot is delivered to Marjan, and the film depicts exactly the event that is recounted by Hedayat’s final words in the story [1]:

That afternoon Marjan put the cage in front of her and stared at the bird's multi-colored wings, hooked beak, and round tired eyes. Suddenly the parrot, in a voice that echoed Dash Akol's, said, "Marjan... Marjan... you've killed me. Whom can I tell? Marjan, your love has killed me."

Tears ran down Marjan's cheeks.

There are some rough edges to this film production.  In particular some of the rapid-fire, nearly subliminal, editorial cuts don’t work and are only distracting.  Also, some of the melodramatic histrionics go too far.  But overall, Kimiai’s moody mise-en-scene creates a somber atmosphere that is surprisingly effective. 

Ultimately, Dash Akol knew that he could have asked for Marjan’s hand and that both the girl and her mother would have accepted.  But he felt that such an act would have been a betrayal of his honorable commitment to Hadji Samad.  To take advantage of his position as Hadji Samad’s estate executor would have been a failure to live up to his standards of a lutigar.  This is not just a matter of losing face; it represented a sincere commitment to live up to a high standard. 

In this sense Dash Akol’s life existed on two levels.  On one level was an abstract plane where the idealistic principles of lutigari and Marjan’s heavenly eyes resided.  On a lower level was the plane of real, embodied engagement.  It was on this lower level that Dash Akol performed his heroic deeds and could have had a lasting love with Aghdass.  You cannot really live on that upper level; you can only refer to it as a beacon to guide you. Dash Akol was a good man, but he suffered, because he was unable to fully bridge the gap between these two levels. This led to the grim outcome. 

The film’s closing statement is Sadegh Hedayat’s gloomy pronouncement on man’s perpetual existential loneliness:

 “Life has many problems that you may have to suffer all by yourself.”

★★★½ 

 

Notes:

1. Sadeqh Hedayat, “Dash Akol” (Kimberley A. Brown, trans), Bashiri Working Papers on Central Asia and Iran (Iraj Bashiri), (1999).
2. Sohila Sarem, “DĀŠ ĀKOL”, Encyclopedia Iranica, (30 August 2011).       
3. English translations of many of these works can be found at
• Iraj Bashiri, "Sadeq Hedayat's Corner”, Bashiri Working Papers on Central Asia and Iran, (n.d.).   
4. For D. P. Costello’s English translation of The Blind Owl, try here.
5. Anthony Shay, “A Rainbow of Iranian Masculinities: Raqqas, a Type of Iranian Male Image”, Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont, (1 January 2017).   
6. Willem Floor, “LUTI”, Encyclopedia Iranica, (15 March 2010).     
7. Arley Loewen, “KĀKAGI”, Encyclopedia Iranica, (19 April 2012). 

“Devi” - Satyajit Ray (1960)

When Satayajit Ray’s Devi (The Goddess, 1960) was first released in India, it aroused a storm of protest about the film’s alleged anti-Hindu bias, which led some parliamentarians to argue that the film should be denied an export license [1,2]. But actually the film is much more than just a criticism of religion – it is a many-layered and haunting examination of

• religious mysticism, 
• modernist versus traditionalist cultural conflict,
• fanaticism,
• psychological obsession, and
• feminine mystery.

The specific controversy about religious criticism of Hinduism may have been exacerbated by the Ray’s familial background of Brahmoism, which is a reformist Bengali Hindu movement begun in the 18th century that has sought a more refined form of Hinduism released from some of its more archaic customs, such as belief in avatars (human incarnations of the gods). Although traditionalist Hindus have customarily viewed Brahmos with suspicion, Ray was always somewhat agnostic about specific religious doctrines and was not a staunch follower of Brahmoism.  Interestingly, though, there is a further Brahmo connection to this story.

Ray’s script for Devi was based on a story by Prabhat Kumar Mukherji written in 1899 and which was apparently, itself, based on real events in connection with an innocent young woman who was thought to be an avatar of the Hindu goddess Devi [3]. The great Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, himself a Brahmo, had been interested in writing a story about these events, but hesitated because he thought his own Brahmoist connections might lead to controversy. So Tagore suggested the story to his friend Mukherji, who was a Brahmin and therefore above reproach [3]. 

Probably in order to provide some safe distance from existing cultural issues and potential backlash, Mukherji set his story to take place a century earlier, in the 1790s.  When Ray rescripted Mukherji’s story, he advanced the setting forward to the 1860s, which was still in the safely remote past, but which could incorporate India’s colonial confrontation with modernity and the resulting calls for social reform.  This time shift also conveniently enabled Ray to retain Mukherji’s opening statement that the story to be told was set a century ago.

The cast of Devi featured a number of key performers from Ray’s earlier successes, Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958), and Apu Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959):

• Dayamoyee (“Daya”),  the ill-fated young girl, was played by Sharmila Tagore (Apu Sansar), who also happens to be the great-great-grand niece of Rabindranath Tagore;
• Umaprasad (“Uma”), Daya’s husband, was played by Soumitra Chatterjee (Apu Sansar);
• Kalikinkar Choudhuri Roy, Daya’s father-in-law, was played by Chhabi Biswas (The Music Room);
• Harasundari, Daya’s sister-in-law, was played by Karuna Bannerjee (Pather Panchali and Aparajito).

They would all appear in later Ray films, as well.

In connection with Devi’s religious theme, it should be mentioned that Hinduism’s variegated and multi-stranded theology is complicated by any standard.  Of particular interest here is the notion of Shakti, which is the agent of creation and change and, according to some traditions, the Supreme Being.  The female form of Shakti is Devi, the ultimate goddess.  Among the more embodied manifestations of Devi are the goddesses  Durga and Kali.  Durga is a warrior goddess who represents the destruction of Evil.  Kali, often represented as the consort of Lord Shiva, is generally a darker side of Devi and is the symbolic representative of time (and hence change), as well as death.  In some stories Durga and Kali work together to combat evil forces.  In Satyajit Ray’s Bengal, Durga, known as the “mother goddess”, is particularly popular.  The Durga Puja is the principal annual religious festival and concludes with the ceremonial immersion of Durga idols (life-sized manikins representing the goddess) in the river, symbolically bidding farewell to the goddess for her annual return to her Himalayan home. 

So Shakti, Devi, Kali, and Durga are all connected and they all represent the mysterious female energy of the universe. This does not represent static perfection; instead it is associated with dynamism and change – the unknowable future that may portend ecstasy or annihilation. Although this representation of feminine mystery has been worshiped, it has also been feared. If the tide turns against such a mysterious female form, she can be reviled and charged with witchcraft.

Ray’s Devi touches on these themes and at the same time places the action in a very human setting involving the young married couple, Uma and Daya.  The story passes through three phases of Daya’s progressive suffocation in religious confinement, which are punctuated by Uma’s attempts to exert his influence.

1.  Marital Bliss
The opening sequence shows Uma, Daya, and their five-year-old nephew Khoka witnessing the celebrations of the Durga Puja.  They live in the luxurious estate of Uma’s father, Kalikinkar, who is a feudal landlord.  Later we see Uma and Day in bed, in one of Ray’s captivating scenes of connubial bliss, evoking memories in my mind of similar loving affection between the same two performers, Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore, in Apu Sansar. In both cases the scene is modestly portrayed, but the amorous attachment is beautifully evident. The two of them are shown discussing Uma's upcoming departure to depart to Calcutta to take up university studies and how Daya will cope with being apart from her beloved husband for several months. Uma comforts her by telling her to look after his little nephew, Khoka, who is a favorite of Daya's. Uma then slyly tells her that in the future there will be other little Khokas around, which induces a warm blush out of Daya. This is about as close as you could come in this genre to depicting romantic passion.

After Uma’s departure, Daya dutifully attends to her father-in-law, rubbing his lame foot in the evening in the fashion of a devoted daughter-in-law.  In fact Daya is so loving and affectionate that she animates and charms the entire household – from Kalikinkar, to Khoka (who always wants Daya to tell him another bedtime story, much to the consternation of his jealous mother), and even to the family parrot (who keeps repeating her name).

2.  A Goddess is Discovered
Kalikinkar is a devout, indeed fanatic, follower of Devi (Durga) and never misses his regular prayers to her in the household shrine devoted to the goddess. One evening after being particularly charmed by Daya’s care-giving attentions, he dreams of Kali/Durga and imagines  Daya’s face merging into an image of a statue of the goddess. The decorative bindi on Daya’s forehead is superimposed on the matching third-eye on the statue, symbolizing Kali’s divine insight. Kalikinkar awakens at once with the conviction that his daughter-in-law must be an avatar of Devi. 
   
This scene is particularly memorable and presents the core visualization of the mysterious hypnotic connection between the feminine and the divine [4].  Indeed, when I watched this scene I was reminded of Sadegh Hedayat’s evocation of this mystery in his mesmerizing novel, The Blind Owl (1937) [5].

Kalikinkar immediately orders his older son, Taraprasad, to join him in worshipfully bowing down at the feet of the newly discovered goddess now in their midst.  Soon the household staff is ordered to isolate the young woman in a separate room and to treat her like a deity.

Daya is terrified but submissive.  She is only seventeen-years-old and ill-equipped to deal with the fanatic storm enclosing her.  So she demurely withdraws into a shell of modesty and tries to avoid offending the worshipful crowd around her.  She sits in front of the relentlessly chanting worshipers and tries to keep still.  But when she is finally overcome by the rampant incense fumes and faints, Kalikinkar triumphantly affirms that his daughter-in-law has gone into a holy trance.

Daya’s heretofore envious sister-in-law, Harasundari (who is Taraprasad’s wife and Khoka’s mother), is horrified by the mindless idolatry she sees developing around Daya, and she writes a letter to Uma to return from Calcutta and see what is happening.

Meanwhile, Daya now attracts locals who long for a holy presence. One peasant comes to her and asks Daya to use her magic powers to cure his sick child.

Uma returns and hesitantly challenges his father about what he is doing. Their conversation is a classic encounter between blind tradition and modernists reasoning. But Indian domestic culture was imbued with filial submission, and Uma tries to maintain a respectful posture towards his religiously impassioned father. His arguments are interrupted, however, by shouts from outside their room announcing that Daya has performed a miracle and cured the sick child.

Uma rushes to Daya and arranges for them to escape the estate by boat.  But when they reach the river, Daya sees an abandoned idol from the Durga Puja on the beach and shrinks back from continuing their flight.  She fearfully tells Uma that maybe she is possessed and that she is afraid their departure will bring on a curse.  Uma, not wishing to force his beloved to do something against her will, reluctantly returns her to the household.

3.  The Departure of Reason

Daya is now increasingly isolated and further retreats into her shell.  Khoka doesn’t come to her anymore. The only being she can still relate to is the parrot.  Meanwhile Uma retreats to Calcutta and talks to his modernist college professor, who inspires him to stand up and fight for what he believe in. 

But back at the rural estate, Khoka suddenly becomes seriously ill. When his mother, Harisundari, summons a doctor, she is informed that a mere doctor’s efforts are minuscule compared to those of a goddess – she should take Khoka to Daya for a proper cure. This gives worried, but up til now skeptical mother, pause, and now even the she begins to wonder if perhaps Daya really does have divine powers.  Khoka is brought to Daya and placed in her arms for the night.

The next day Uma returns from Calcutta, only to discover that Khoka has died – he is told that the goddess has “taken him”. Everyone is questioning why the “Mother” has done such a terrible thing. Uma now has the courage to speak his mind and thunders at his father’s blind beliefs in his own dreams. Then he rushes to Daya, but he finds that the intense psychological pressure on her and lack of sleep has taken its toll. She has lost her mind. 

Fearful of demons, or perhaps charges of witchcraft, she tells Uma that they must flee for their lives.  The closing shot shows her fleeing into a meadow and disappearing from sight.


The cinematography in Devi, under the joint supervision of Ray and cinematographer Subrata Mitra, is superb and shows the further development of their skills in cinematic expression. Throughout the film there is the subtle use of small camera movements, atmospheric compositions, and ambient sounds to maintain an almost expressionistic feeling of psychological closure and oppression.  This atmosphere is further enhanced by the musical composition and sarod-playing of Ustad Ali Akhbar Khan. 

The penultimate shot showing Uma coming upon the deranged Daya in her room has a harsh, overexposed backlighting to it arising from having the stage lights directed into the camera. Evidently Mitra was opposed to this way of lighting the scene, but Ray insisted on it. I think the shot works, giving the scene its peculiarly spectral quality [1].

Also outstanding is the acting in the film, particularly that of Sharmila Tagore, Soumitra Chatterjee, Chhabi Biswas, and Karuna Bannerjee.  Each portrays a believable character having his or her own believable psychological motivations and perspectives. Even the extreme character of Kalikinkar, as played by Chhabi Biswas, is comprehensible, and we can empathically follow his actions. He becomes enamored of his beautiful and gracious daughter-in-law, Daya, but certainly not in a physically lustful manner.  Since he is such a devout follower of a religious path, his sublimated passions of human desire are transformed into that of worshipful devotion. Thus these four principal players provide the multi-layered human context that enriches the drama with multiple perspectives and elevates it above a simple conceptualization.

It is interesting to know that originally, Ray’s original plan was to have Daya shown drowning in the river at the end of the film [1]. But that shot was ruined and apparently could not be re-done.  In its place, Ray then had a final scene showing Daya mysteriously dying by the river bank just as Uma rushes up to reach her. But prior to the film’s screening at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, Ray removed that final shot, too, and left the film as it stands today – with Daya disappearing into the meadow. I think Ray made the right choice. Her disappearance this way is even more apparitional and in accordance with the film’s eerie tenor.

It is interesting to compare Devi with Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943).  Both films brilliantly convey an innocent young woman overwhelmed by a superstitious community looking for people to whom they can attribute causal powers and therefore find simple explanations (and cast blame) for the mysteries around them. But the two films evoke contrasting feelings. Dreyer’s film is funereal, and there is a feeling of dread, with a dry and abstract aura of doom penetrating the proceedings. In contrast, Ray’s film is more embodied, and therefore more ambivalent and more mysteriously equivocal. At the end we are left wondering what it is about the unknowable and intoxicating feminine persona that has mystified mankind for so many millennia and has led to such errant attempts to force an unobtainable answer.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Marie Seton, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray,  (1971), Indiana University Press, pp. 150-160.
2. This kind of chauvinistic fault-finding of one of the greatest film directors was hardly new – Ray’s earlier masterful “Apu Trilogy” (Pather Panchali, 1955, Aparajito, 1956; Apu Sansar, 1958) was similarly criticized by narrow-minded Indians for supposedly dwelling on poverty.   
3. Dilip K. Basu, “On Satyajit Ray's Film Adaptation of The Goddess", Zoetrope: All-Story, vol 8, no. 3 (2004).
4. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Sing, “From Flesh to Stone: the Divine Metamorphosis in Satyajit Ray’s Devi”, Journal of South Asian Literature, (1993), vol. 28, no. 1/2, pp. 227-249.

5. “They were slanting, Turkoman eyes of supernatural, intoxicating radiance which at once frightened and attracted, as though they had looked upon terrible, transcendental things which it was given to no one but her to see.  Her cheekbones were prominent and her forehead high. Her eyebrows were slender and met in the middle. Her lips were full and half-open as though they had broken away only a moment before from a long, passionate kiss and were not yet sated.  Her face, pale as the moon, was framed in the mass of her black, disheveled hair and one strand clung to her temple.  The fineness of her limbs and the ethereal unconstraint of her movements marked her as one who was not fated to live long in this world.  No one but a Hindu temple dancer could have possessed her harmonious grace of movement.”

   from The Blind Owl (1937/1957), by Sadegh Hedayat, English translation by D. P. Costello, Grove Press, New York, pp. 26-27.