Famine

By JAY COCKS

DISTANT THUNDER

Directed and Written by SATYAJIT RAY

Satyajit Ray's superb and achingly simple Distant Thunder concerns the famine in Bengal in 1943. It is a matter of record: 5 million people died. Numbers as huge as this can be dangerous. A tragedy of such magnitude becomes an event abstracted by arithmetic. But Ray's artistry alters the scale. His concentrating on just a few victims of the famine causes such massive loss to become real, immediate. Ray makes numbers count.

Distant Thunder has the deliberate, unadorned reality of a folk tale, a fable of encroaching, enlarging catastrophe. The thunder of the title refers directly to the war planes that Bengali villagers see flying overhead. More important, the thunder is the sound of the second World War. To the villagers it seems, at first, remote. They speak wonderingly of "the flying ships," trade rumors of Japanese advances on Singapore and Burma, and live very much as they always have, just skirting absolute deprivation. The war seems mysterious and alien. Then the rice starts running out.

Gangacharan (Soumitra Chatterji) is a Brahmin and pundit, part doctor, part spiritual adviser to the villagers from whom he holds himself gently aloof. Merchants at first spare him a littie rice as an act of deference. But soon, Gangacharan becomes like everyone else, hungry and helpless to do much about it. "There is no rice," a merchant swears to him. "I would not lie to a Brahmin." He would, of course, and does; the villagers all suspect it. There are food riots. Ananga (Babita), Gangacharan's wife, lowers herself to work grinding rice while some still remains. When that too is gone, she goes out to the fields to dig up roots and wild potatoes.

Soon people start to die, in roads and fields. A young woman, an Untouchable, cries out deliriously for fish curry. Ananga gives her what she has, placing it right near the girl's hand: roots torn from the ground. But the girl dies, eyes open, without reaching out. A child, who has been watching and waiting for hours, comes out from behind a bush and car ries the food away.

The triumph of Distant Thunder is Ray's humanism, his careful, measured naturalism. The film, shot in color, is beautiful and direct, sophisticated not in plot but insight. In the last scene, Ananga tells Gangacharan she is pregnant.

Down the parched readjust outside their house walks a family, a father and mother and perhaps six children. They walk into shadow, and we seem to see doz ens, then hundreds of people, until they fill the screen.

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