Distant Thunder (Satyajit Ray, 1973)

 

Satyajit Ray’s 1973 Distant Thunder, set in 1943, is one of his most quietly incisive works, charting how a tiny rural village far removed from world events becomes physically and spiritually decimated by their effects. The film initially focuses on a young teacher, Chakravarti, newly-arrived with his wife; as the only Brahmin in the village he’s also called on to be doctor and spiritual leader, exploiting his privilege with quiet smugness (when called to treat a cholera outbreak in a nearby community, he sizes it up as an opportunity to buy his wife a new sari). But the price of rice starts to rise as the war (directly evidenced only by the planes that occasionally fly overhead, a sight that initially seems wondrous) messes with supply chains, food rapidly becoming virtually inaccessible, prompting chaos and despair. By the end of the film, the perceived superiority of caste has been eviscerated: we realize the teacher’s ignorance on matters of world events (peddling bad information on foreign countries and their role in the war), his status as local leader meaning nothing in the face of escalating hunger, rendering him an ineffectual onlooker, increasingly and symbolically absent from the film as matters deteriorate. The narrative encompasses violent assault both sexually and financially motivated, desperation-motivated prostitution, and even a covered-up murder, but even at its most despairing, the film finds pockets of compassion and empathy (even for characters who Ray makes convincingly hard to put up with), ending in a vision of remade and even expanded community. The final shot, of silhouetted masses shuffling toward the spectator, rather evokes a horror film, and for all its humanity and restraint, Distant Thunder almost invites such categorization, as an examination of sustainable (if imperfect) community devastated by events beyond its understanding or even vague capacity to resist.