Devi (1960)

Not rated.  This more conceptually upsetting than actually anything that would be worrisome.  I mean, there's a lot of sick kids and a lot of those sick kids drink foot water.   But the movie is mostly about religious trauma and how it affects a family.  Yes, it is very upsetting.  But if I had to point to one thing that was really a red flag, I don't think I could really point to anything.   

DIRECTOR: Satyajit Ray

​AH!  I'm so flummoxed right now!  I wrote this.  I remember writing this.  I remember where I wrote this (admittedly, in a place with spotty internet).  But I was looking over my page and saw that there was no post for Devi?  Now, the date for this was the last day of August.  We're almost done with September.  What I should do is rewatch this movie.  But what the reality of the situation is that I don't really have time and I still have strong opinions on this piece.   If this blog isn't as long as some of my other entries, it's because I'm trying to cobble this together because I should be writing about my last movie the Godzilla box set.

I almost quit this movie when I first started watching it.  My goodness, I had real issues with it.  It was one of those movies that I couldn't grasp.  I like Stayajit Ray.  I've watched a trilogy of Satyajit Ray movies.  Those movies were fantastic.  And I'm also going to throw myself under the bus right now for being a midwestern white guy who probably has some unwanted racial issues that I'd like exorcised.  But this is a movie that did nothing to help me figure out who was who.  Do you know how I figured out how to watch this movie?  I had to stop, read the Wikipedia article that summarized the movie up to the point where I got to and then continued with my hand thoroughly held.  Golly, I don't like admitting that I don't recognize characters nor do I understand their relationships to one another.  I'm an English teacher, for goodness sake!  I should be all over this basic stuff.

But once I did, man am I glad that I watched this one.  (Not thrilled that I can't present my nuanced taken on the movie like I wrote about immediately after watching it, but I can at least get something out there.) For those many not in the know, I'm going to do something out of character and summarize the plot.  This might be too obscure for even the biggest film devotee (someone out there might be rolling their eyes and, for that, I apologize).  Doyamoyee, the daughter-in-law of a religious zealot, is --due only to a stray dream on the part of her father-in-law, put in a place where she is meant to be the incarnation of the goddess Kali.  Because she is probably a 9 on the enneagram (I'm getting into the enneagram and becoming insufferable about it), she refuses to stand up for herself,  despite the fact that it is causing problems for her sister-in-law, who refuses to believe that Doyamoyee is a goddess.  People start worshipping this woman, bringing their ill children to drink her foot water in hopes that they are healed.  Just to jump to the end, it all ends with the fact that her nephew is denied scientific medical care in a sign of faith to Kali, leading to the kid dying.  (Man, I hate writing summaries.) 

The turn.  Like, all you really need to do to get me to love your movie is to have a point in making the movie and presenting it in a creative way.  I mean, I can't deny that Devi does swing the cudgel pretty openly.  Kalikinkar Roy is the bad guy of the piece, but he's not evil in the traditional sense.  I mean, I feel such disgust with this character and I'm sure that I'm not alone in that read of the character.  I've been listening to You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes and there's a lot of talk about the confidence of faith.  Literally, before I sat down writing this, there was this talk about faiths that are able to understand God.  They were going back and forth and came to the conclusion that anything that shrunk the majesty of God is not a proper faith.  If you completely "get" what God is or what God is supposed to be, it's an insult to God himself.  That's a lot of Devi.  Devi is a criticism of the individual trying to make God into something that they are not.  

And the beauty of the argument is that there is a direct fallout to this choice.  It's not that Kalikinkar Roy hates his daughter-in-law.  If anything, this is a perversion of love.  He thinks that he is bringing his daughter-in-law to her true fulfillment.  But in the process, he stops seeing her individuality.  Doyamoyee is so non-confrontational --in may be one of my favorite bits -- questions her own mortality.  She is never a character who wishes for veneration.  Instead, she sees it both as a means to keep her family together, but also to serve the community.  It becomes a burden to her, knowing that there may be a slim chance that she would be harming others by denying her divinity. 

It's the seduction of faith.  Listen, I'd like to think that I'm a pretty good Catholic.  I try my darndest.  I am open to faith and I mostly fulfill my responsibilities and then some within my faith parameters.  But I also get that there is something incredibly upsetting about the notion of not knowing what's out there.  I hope I'm not going out too much on a limb and putting my immortal soul in danger (although, if I am, this is only proving my point the more), but I think there's always an element of doubt when it comes to faith.  At least, there's an element of doubt when we approach what I consider to be at least somewhat of a healthy faith.  It's the zealots that scare me.  And that's what zealots do.  Zealots are incredibly charismatic for those who are open to listening to overt devotion to a god.  Kalikinkar Roy never really gives anyone a chance to listen, despite the mounds of evidence opposing what he says.

It's that surredness that he's right and that everyone else is wrong that makes people question themselves.  Doyamoyee, when left to her own devices, never really thinks that she is the goddess.  She is a girl who is trying to do right by her husband who is off getting more schooling (which sounds pretty awesome, but I'm supposed to be critical of him.)  From Kalikinkar Roy's perspective, if there was any doubt that his daughter-in-law was a goddess or not, he doesn't think that there's much wrong with what he does.  It's only as that zealotry becomes contagious and --more importantly --law, that there's a real world consequence of a child dying.  The movie's end, with Doyamoyee disappearing from the estate as Kalikinkar's son --and Royamoyee's husband --scolds him for his obsessiive nature.  I can't help but think that Kalikinkar Roy is living vicariously through his daughter-in-law's newfound divinity.  After all, it is Kalikinkar Roy who had the dream and discovered the incarnation of Kali.  He's the one who sets the laws saying who can come and who can go.  It's thought of as blasphemy to try to give the child any kind of medication, not even as a supplement to prayer.

Like, the movie is damning, guys.  And, yeah, it works as allegory because we're not living in India. But the foundational stuff is all there.  It's pretty darned impressive and I almost didn't have record that I watched it.