DEVI (The Goddess)

Devi aka The Goddess (1960) dir. Satyajit Ray
Starring: Sharmila Tagore, Soumitra Chatterjee, Chhabi Biswas, Karuna Banerjee, Purnendu Mukherjee and Arpan Chowdhury

****

By Greg Klymkiw

“I stopped going to Brahmo Samaj, [the congregation of men who believed in Brahman, the supreme spiritual foundation and sustainer of the universe], around the age of fourteen or fifteen. I don't believe in organized religion anyway. Religion can only be on a personal level.” – Satyajit Ray (1982 interview with Cineaste)

Great movies survive.

They survive because their truth is universal. Their compassion for humanity astonishes to degrees that are reverent, or even holy. Finally, they must weave every conceivable power of cinema’s vast arsenal of technique and artistry to create expression (narrative or otherwise) that can ultimately and only be realized by the medium of film.

Movies might well be the greatest artistic gift granted to man by whatever Supreme Intelligence has created him, and yet, like so much on this Earth that’s been taken for granted, cinema has been squandered in homage to the Golden Calf, or if you will, has turned Our Father’s House into a market.

Satyajit (The Apu Trilogy, The Music Room) Ray was a director who, on a very personal level (in spite of his occasional protestations to the contrary), infused his films with a truth that went far beyond the disposable cinematic baubles and trinkets that continue to flood the hearts and minds of our most impressionable.

Devi (The Goddess) is a film of consummate greatness. Its simple tale of blind faith springing from organized worship and leading the most vulnerable on a downward spiral into madness is surely a film as relevant now as it was in 1960. Upon its first release it was initially condemned in India for being anti-Hindu. If it’s anti-anything, it’s anti-ignorance and anti-superstition, but even this puts far too much weight upon the film having a political perspective rather than on moral and emotional turf – which ultimately is where it rests.

Set in a rural area of Bengal in 1860, the movie tells the story of a young married couple whose love and commitment to each other is beyond reproach. When Umaprasad (Soumitra Chatterjee) must leave his wife Doyamoyee (Sharmila Tagore) to finish his university education in Calcutta, she begs him to stay and questions his need to leave. Though he comes from a wealthy family, he seeks intellectual enlightenment in order to provide him with a good job so he does not have to rest on the laurels of mere birthright. Doya, so young and naïve, cannot comprehend his desire to leave her for any reason.

During a very moving and even romantic exchange, he informs her – not in a boastful way, but more as a matter of fact and with a touch of dashing humour that she is indeed endowed with an extremely intelligent husband. He is proud of this, as he is equally proud of how much his teachers value his intellect. He seeks to impress upon her that this is a trait that makes him a far more desirable husband for her – more than his money and more than his good looks. His intelligence is part and parcel of the very being that can love such a perfect woman as Doya.

When he leaves, however, things take a very bad turn. At first, Doya goes about her simple, charmed life in the same house they live in with Umaprasad’s father Kalikinkar (Chhabi Biswas), his brother Taraprasad (Purnendu Mukherjee) and sister-in-law Harasundari (Karuna Banerjee) and their sweet, almost angelic little boy Khoka (Arpan Chowdhury). She proves to be a magnificent in-law and aunt – a friend to her sister-in-law, a respectful servant to her father-in-law and a loving playmate for nephew Khoka. Alas, Doya’s father-in-law has a prophetic dream wherein it is revealed to him that Doya is the human incarnation of the Goddess Kali. While Kali is often viewed as a symbol of death, many Bengalis viewed her as a benevolent mother figure, which Doya’s father-in-law and those who live in this particular region of Bengal most certainly do.

This turns Doya’s life completely topsy-turvy – especially once she is forced to sit in the shrine to Kali whilst the denizens of the region pay homage to her and eventually expect her to grant mercies and miracles. In one sequence in particular, an old man brings his dying grandson to her threshold and pleads that she bestows upon him the ultimate resurrection.

Strangely, this sequence – so gut wrenching, suspenseful and yes, even touching on a spiritual level – had for me a similar power to the climactic moments of Carl Dreyer’s immortal classic of faith and madness Ordet (The Word) where a madman who believes he is Christ questions the faith of the devout and instead, places all the power of faith in that of a young girl to resurrect her dead mother. (This, by the way, would make for one truly amazing double-bill – the parallels are uncanny.)

Hell, as it were, breaks loose for Doya when those around her genuinely have immoveable faith in her lofty, hallowed position and eventually, it is up to her husband to attempt a rescue – using his powers of intellect over superstition to bring back the sweet young woman he married.

Where director Ray takes us on the rest of this journey and how he achieves this is exactly the reason why he is revered as one of cinema’s true, undisputed greats. There are moments of such exquisite truth with images so gorgeously composed and lit that the combination of this indelible pairing can and, indeed does evoke a series of emotional responses - so much so that you may find yourself weeping with a strange amalgam of sadness and joy. The manner in which Doya is lit at various points is especially evocative.

Ultimately, though, it is Ray’s humanity that prevails and seeps into every frame of this stunning picture.

This movie MUST be seen. To not experience Devi is to not acknowledge the magnitude of cinema as the premiere art form of our time.

It's a heart breaker!

On August 14 at the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Bell Lightbox, Devi is being screened as part of the phenomenal Fellini Dream Double Bills series during the Fellini: Spectacular Obsessions exhibit. Selected by Deepa Mehta, the director of the Earth, Fire and Water trilogy, Devi plays with Federico Fellini’s utterly perfect and exquisite masterpiece Nights of Cabiria. Mehta’s reasoning behind this pairing is as follows: “I could give many reasons for the affinities between (and the greatness of) these films, but mostly it’s how both Fellini and Ray walk the difficult line between reality and the wondrous, and of course the compassion that pours out of them right into their characters.” Though someday I want to see Devi with the aforementioned Dreyer classic Ordet, I cannot in any way, shape or form quarrel with Mehta’s statement.

As a sidenote, I think it's important to mention a recent first feature from Indian (Kashmir) filmmaker Amir Bashir who, on the basis of "Autumn/Harud", which premiered last year at TIFF 2010, is clearly the most obvious heir apparent to Satyajit Ray. OPEN NOTE to Lightbox Topper Noah Cowan and/or Senior Programmer James Quandt: PLAY THIS MOVIE THEATRICALLY!!! It's, in my humble opinion, one of TIFF's most extraordinary discoveries and demands a proper playdate in Toronto. My original DFD coverage on "Autumn/Harud" can be found HERE and an extensive interview with the filmmaker at my Electric Sheep column is HERE.

My previously published Daily Film Dose review of Nights of Cabiria can be read HERE. My colleague Alan Bacchus's review of Ray's The Music Room can be read at HERE

Nights of Cabiria

Nights of Cabiria (1957) dir. Federico Fellini
Starring Giulietta Masina, Francois Perier, Alberto Lazzari

****

By Greg Klymkiw

Can there be any greater feeling than that which comes from ascension?

Movies at their very best can make you feel this way. They make you soar.

Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria is just such a movie. Screening in Toronto at the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Bell Lightbox cinemas on Sunday, August 14 at 6:15pm, it is part of a sumptuous celebration entitled “Fellini: Spectacular Obsessions” and includes a very cool series of double bills that pairs a Fellini picture with the work of another filmmaker treading similar (or contrasting) waters.

(My only criticism of this great collection of pictures is that Il Bidone is not screening at all. In fact, a perfect pairing for it would be something like Your Three Minutes Are Up, the neglected 70s American classic by Douglas Schwartz. A personal note to TIFF Bell Lightbox topper Noah Cowan: "Get on this, bud – it’ll be an evening guaranteed to blow us all away".)

In the TIFF Bell Lightbox Gallery, one will also find a series of exquisite exhibitions that include screen tests of Fellini grotesques, the inspiration for the Trevi Fountain sequence from La Dolce Vita and a whack o’ photos of pure tabloid genius.

As for the upcoming Nights of Cabiria I can freely and happily declare that it never fails to cascade me emotionally into what feels like another dimension. As a filmmaker, Fellini makes it all seem so effortless. His genius notwithstanding, he (nor we) would ever get there, I think, without some experience, or at least understanding of Judeo-Christian tradition (particularly, the Christian portion, and more precisely, that of Catholicism). The maestro was, of course, Italian and what is it to be of that heritage if one has not been touched, shaped, moulded, pounded and cudgelled by the patriarchal power that is the Catholic Church? (Doing the math on this, Fellini's childhood would have corresponded quite neatly with that of Pope Pius XI - Mr. Anti-Contraception and Pro-Sex-For-Procreation himself.)

Fellini knew all too well and continually explored the notion of redemption via false prophets. And I do not mean Christ, but rather, those within, and most often at the highest levels of any organized faith who seek to dominate and control by proselytizing distorted teachings to the weakest and most vulnerable of society.

Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) is just such an individual and it’s no surprise that even the film’s title states clearly that we are to journey through the Nights of Cabiria. It’s the darkness of night that roots us in a place from where we are allowed find the light.

One of the picture’s screenwriters was none other than the iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom). In both life and his art, he knew a lot about sexual exploitation – most notably, the world of prostitution wherein the body becomes the sought after commodity through which money is paid to experience la petite mort. (Pasolini was the go-to boy for those in Italian cinema seeking an "expert" on the fine art of whoring and whoredom.) In Nights of Cabiria it is, finally, the “little death” that seeks to undermine our title character – the dashing of hopes and dreams that come from unspeakable and/or unwanted acts of cruelty perpetrated upon those hoping to achieve a higher state – a state of grace, if you will.

And so goes this simple tale of Cabiria, a waif-like, almost Chaplinesque figure of innocence (or naiveté) who works the world’s oldest profession to preserve a standard of living (owning her own home and having a bank account - vaguely and interestingly rather bourgeois values) that is achieved by a life of “sin”.

Her goal is to find love. What she gets in return is redemption. From the opening scene where a loathsome pimp steals her money and shoves her into the river, to the horrendous moments when Carlos (François Périer) the man she thinks loves her, contemplates murder to secure a life’s worth of savings, Fellini delivers a powerful drama. We see, ultimately, a woman who is abused and exploited at the hands of men within a society that is rooted in the abovementioned patriarchy of persecution - indelibly linked, as it is, to the “business” of spirituality, of religion – the monetization of faith.

Thankfully, through all this remains Fellini’s command of the filmmaking process and his faith in the title character. His beloved Cabiria is no fool, nor is she a pushover. She’s a tough cookie in a den of lions – a fighter, a wise cracker, a street-smart streetwalker who, when she accompanies a good Samaritan on the rounds to feed the poor, is still able to see in others a mirror image of what could become of her if she doesn’t remain wary, and most importantly, IN CONTROL.

Control is, of course, the continued plight of those women who work in the sex trade. Their buyers are men and often, their true exploiters are not always the Johns, but rather, a society that allows – through the demonizing and criminalizing of the profession – a systematic exploitation of those same women at the hands of pimps, gigolos and gangsters (many of whom are corrupt cops, lawmakers and more often than not, men). In one of the picture’s more harrowing sequences, we follow Cabiria and a group of other whores as they attend a religious miracle revival outside of Rome as the disenfranchised, seeking quick-fix redemption, are surrounded by the cheap hucksterism and circus-like atmosphere of the root of this exploitation – religion itself, or, if you will, the corruption and exploitation of faith.

It is finally faith that is at once shattered and just as quickly restored in the film’s final moments. Cabiria believes in the lies of the seemingly sensitive and very charming Carlos, but it is her will to survive and to persevere and finally, her belief in her own goodness and that of humanity that allows her to go on – to disappear back into the world and begin again.

None of this would be possible without Fellini. In fact, Nights of Cabiria is really the last of his great works in the neo-realist tradition of I Vitelloni, La Strada, Il Bidone (a film in which Fellini purportedly came to know a prostitute who provided him much of his inspiration for the Cabiria role) and The White Sheik (in which Cabiria appears as a supporting character). From La Dolce Vita and onwards, there would be occasional dollops of neo-realism, but more often than not, his work became increasingly surreal and fantastical. While there is considerable greatness in many of them, nothing really comes close to the overwhelming compassion of this earlier phase.

With Nights of Cabiria, I’d also argue that we see Masina’s finest work as an actress (somehow she truly does embody the spirit of Chaplin) and among a lifetime of indelible scores, Nino Rota’s music for this is at his most heartbreakingly eloquent.

Like I said before, the picture will have you soaring higher than you ever thought possible. That’s the real greatness of Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria – it allows you the freedom to be weightless within the overwhelming spirit of humanity.

While “Nights of Cabiria” is currently out of print on the Criterion Collection DVD label, it can still be found for sale or rent.