Cinema: Goddess in the Flesh

Devi follows the triumphant “Apu” trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, The World of Apu) of India’s young producerdirector, Satyajit Ray. If it does not quite measure up to the earlier triumphs, it is probably because the new film lacks the trilogy’s earthy excitement. For instead of dealing with the struggles and ordeals of a poor-but-proud lower-class family, Devi moves through the silk and saffron world of a rich household in 19th century India.

The people in Devi (The Goddess) seem almost like temple carvings come to life before Ray’s camera. A rich and deeply religious old patriarch dreams that his 17-year-old daughter-in-law (Sharmila Tagore) is an incarnation of a goddess. The girl, eager to please, allows herself to be decked out in flowers and jewels, to be ensconced in an altar outside her father-in-law’s house where streams of peasants and holy men come to make obeisance. When a beggar’s sick grandson recovers in her presence, the event is hailed as a miracle, and even the girl begins to doubt her own mortality.

Her husband, a proud young student who has embraced Western ideas at college in Calcutta, returns to his father’s home to discover that his wife has been deified, and tries to take her away with him. But she wavers: “What if I am a goddess? The child was cured”—and she stays behind. Her little nephew falls ill, and instead of being cared for by a doctor, the child is placed in the arms of the goddess. He dies. When her husband returns once more, determined to take her away, it is too late: she has gone mad.

Ray’s photography is beautifully composed, always evocative of mood and moment (a crescent boat on a lonely, twilit river seems to whisper the young husband’s hope of escape for himself and his wife). But it is Sharmila Tagore’s remarkable eyes that steal the scene and fill the screen whenever she is in view: their match can be found only in peacocks’ plumes.