DVD of the Week: Satyajit Ray’s “Distant Thunder”

The Indian director Satyajit Ray’s 1973 drama, “Distant Thunder,” (which I discuss in this clip) is a period piece, set during the Second World War and fictionalizing the true story of a famine that struck India as a direct result of the war—the Japanese conquest of Burma and Singapore and the diversion by Great Britain (then the country’s colonial master) of rice to its troops. The story is centered on a young Brahmin couple in a Bengali village whose caste grants them advantages but also, from a dramatic perspective, gives them access to a wide spectrum of Indian society. By following them, Ray gradually observes the deepening crisis in terrifying detail. Though the film is a drama that wrings emotion from its characters’ fate, it’s also a vision of the inexorable abstract machinery of economics. The laws of supply and demand act as the master plot, the ledgers of merchants function like a script. Yet, for Ray, their implication is moral. In the face of hunger and desperation, civil society comes off its hinges as swiftly and devastatingly as if washed away by natural disaster. In his view, the fragile bond of humanity rests in the hidden hand of politics; his triumph as an artist is its revelation.