Distant Thunder (1973)
Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Bobita, Sandhya Roy
Director: Satyajit Ray
Country: India
Genre: Drama
Official Site: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for TIFF’s The Sun and the Moon: The Films of Satyajit Ray. For more information on upcoming TIFF film series visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.
Behemoths of war rumble overhead and block out the sun in shadows carved from steel as people living ancient agrarian lifestyles look upward and see the inevitable conclusion of their way of life. Neighbors become competitors for dwindling resources as scarcity is manufactured from fear and the death of empathy triggered by flashes of lightning on the eastern horizon indicating massive storms that have little to do with the price of rice (and human souls) in rural Bengal. In Satyajit Ray’s Distant Thunder, the complex circumstances that triggered the Great Famine of 1943 are examined from the ground level as villagers starved or were forced into prostitution by crop failures, disease, and the distant rumblings of World War II.
In Satyajit Ray’s Distant Thunder, the complex circumstances that triggered the Great Famine of 1943 are examined from the ground level …
We follow the lives of farmers and a newly arrived Brahmin (religious figure and workaday village intellectual) and his attractive wife as they contend with the tumultuous tides of distant war that sends ripples through the landscape, instilling fear in the hearts of people well outside of the line of fire as uncertainty reveals itself as a secret agent of death and destruction. The prideful Brahmin and his wife are able to maintain the illusion of superiority as other villagers succumb to the indignities of necessity, but given time those necessities will force even the most prideful into demeaning situations as it becomes necessary to either live as a beggar or die by principles.
Distant Thunder replaces Ray’s usual black and white photography from this era of his career with a sparse color pallet of subdued earth tones, creating a bleak portrait of rural Bengal in the throes of a manmade catastrophe and bringing it to life in ways that stark black and white could not achieve. The romanticism of black and white filmmaking might render heroes and giants from light and shadow but the muted, unostentatious colors of Distant Thunder combine with its calculated languid pacing to show the effects of famine without mawkish over-sentimentality that would rob the film of the intimacy of its human scale.
…. the muted, unostentatious colors of Distant Thunder combine with its calculated languid pacing to show the effects of famine without mawkish over-sentimentality that would rob the film of the intimacy of its human scale.
In Distant Thunder, Satyajit Ray shows us the ways in which perception can have catastrophic effects on reality and how delicate the complex ecosystems that allow us to live a comfortable existence can be. The boots of infantrymen may never touch the ground of a village in rural Bengal, but the effects of war can be just as devastating, especially when combined with drought and fungal infections that devastate the rice crop for an entire year and claim the lives of three million people.
In Distant Thunder, Satyajit Ray shows us the ways in which perception can have catastrophic effects on reality and how delicate the complex ecosystems that allow us to live a comfortable existence can be.
