Two New Criterions: Devi (1960) and The Thin Red Line (1998)(Review)

After early November’s Blu-Ray of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox, Criterion UK release a pair of movies unconnected save for their very different approaches to making a film about faith. And that’s “a film about faith” rather than a “faith-based film”. The latter is generally used as a synonym for “Western, usually American, films aimed at an Evangelical Christian market”; even if Satyajit Ray’s Devi wasn’t about Hinduism, its worldview still wouldn’t fit in that niche. An emotionally brutalising tragedy about the human cost of fanaticism, its message that faith is no substitute for medicine is as relevant today as it was sixty-one years ago.

That said, Ray is far too humane a director to make a simplistic rant. He knows that, in order to critique religion’s place in society, you must first establish how it got there and what it offers to people. There is a magnificent early cut from a machete falling on a (thankfully off-screen) sacrificial animal to a firework exploding, which illustrates the ecstasy of worship in a fraction of a second. The drama revolves around a couple played by Sharmila Tagore and Soumitra Chatterjee, two future Ray regulars who had just finished making The World of Apu. Soumitra’s character lives with his father, who – after a vivid dream – is convinced his son’s bride is an avatar of the goddess Kali.

The extras include a video essay by Meheli Sen, who excavates the following, wonderful quote from Ray: “The Western critic who hopes to do full justice to Devi must be prepared to do a great deal of homework before he confronts the film. He must read up on the cult of the Mother Goddess, on the nineteenth-century renaissance in Bengal and how it affected the values of orthodox Hindu society, on the position of the Hindu bride in an upper-class family, and on the relationship between father and son in the same family.” So, no pressure there, then! Yet I didn’t find it as inaccessible as that implies. Perhaps, in this globalised world, Indian religion is less of a mystery to Westerners than it was back then – but perhaps the purpose and common humanity of Ray’s film-making is capable of bridging any international divide. It’s one of his greatest works, as beautiful as it is bruising.

I’m not sure I could say the same about Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, although rewatching it for this review confirmed that every time I see it I like it slightly more. At first, I felt it was a less suitable vehicle for Malick’s signature style and eco-pantheist concerns than The New World, or even the unjustly rejected To the Wonder. World War II had many tragedies, but the destruction of rare birds’ eggs is not, I would venture, one of the worst.

After COP26, where world leaders insistently denied that cutting carbon emissions would involve any reduction in militarisation whatsoever, the idea that war is an ecological tragedy no longer looks like a stretch. Malick’s Christianity – like it or not, the key to his work – also fits satisfyingly into this exploration of how even the ultimate Good War was still an offence against God’s creation. There is also a Blu-Ray extra where Kaylie Jones, daughter of source author James Jones, explains how her father found it impossible to write about his war experiences until he hit on the structuring idea of treating his platoon as one gestalt protagonist – no central character, just shifting focus from soldier to soldier. This, too, is something Malick is better-positioned to bring to the screen than any other director.

Admittedly, that ensemble feel is not helped by the fleeting, distracting cameos for George Clooney and John Travolta that attracted outsize attention on release. Malick would get better at incorporating star personas into his mosaics: To the Wonder cut appearances from Jessica Chastain, Rachel Weisz and Michael Sheen, but kept an extended cameo from Rachel McAdams because the character required a star to draw attention to it. In The Thin Red Line he has yet to acclimatise to this – the odd double-duty of wanting to make semi-improvised, made-in-the-edit films that everyone in Hollywood wants to be in – but the extras allow you to see more of Clooney, and something of the legendary, completely excised Mickey Rourke performance. The extras are terrific even by Criterion standards, as well as perfectly Malickian: how many other film-makers could inspire consecutive bonus features titled “Guadalcanal newsreels” and “Melanesian chants”?

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THANK YOU FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF THE THIN RED LINE & DEVI