Devi (1960)

Satyajit Ray's mesmerizing fable Devi glides with the simple body of a parrot, and, despite being in black and white, attracts the eye just as well as the exotic bird. Devi is a film that says as much, if not more, with its cinematography when compared to its script. While strongly character driven in sections, the film as a whole follows a simple fable of a man suddenly believing his daughter-in-law to be a deity...religious mania ensues. It's in the frame where that emotion is heightened by the calculating eye of Ray, and the man who shoots the soul of the picture: Subrata Mitra. Like the greats (James Wong Howe, Douglas Slocombe etc.), Mitra plays with light in ways that emboss the actors in light-drunk hazes or hides them behind mysterious silk veils of darkness. He also inventively creates new frames based on clever camera movements, like we're seeing the room from new sets of eyes.

Dulal Dutta's editing shows us the power of the Kali imagery and the effect it has on these people in the film's famous opening. All without a lick of pandering dialogue. In fact, I love the way the characters are written in this film where we get to learn about them through more natural occurring events. We learn about the family's social status by spying on the husband's conversation at his English school; we learn about lead actor Sharmila Tagore's character through her day-to-day interactions as a wife in a wealthy complex in Bengal. It makes the drama so much more personal, when little things start to go wrong we notice alongside the characters. And when things go wrong characters are quick to start criticizing, pointing fingers at social, religious, and familial structures.

And yet it's in the absence of information where Devi hits me the most. The haunting way the plot suddenly begins, striking at random like the vision in the film. The way characters seem to treat logic as if it were something subconscious and how it spirals them into a web of distrust. The religious question looming overhead, was the vision real or hoax? It's a movie that is tidy enough to allow you to get the point, but smart in what it says and what it shows. It doesn't hurt that the score is equally dream-like, having all the hypnotic qualities of Hindustani music, like the brain-scanning sitar strings and chiming percussion. With all this, Devi commands the same magnetizing attention as its titular goddess while telling of a quieter, more domestic death and destruction.