Ray, Satyajit - Tom Milne

TOM MILNE

Light shimmering on the water; what appears to be a dead hand floating just beneath the surface; then the hand idly begins to toy with the ripples, and the camera gently pans to reveal a girl dreamily bathing in the river and staring up at the sky as five fighter planes sweep by in formation: "How beautiful", she exclaims, "like a flight of cranes". This sequence of images immediately following the credits of Distant Thunder (themselves placed over images of tranquil nature and stormy winds starting to ruffle a field of waving corn) is Ray at his complex, evocative best. Long before we discover that this is some time after the fall of Singapore and that the distant thunder of World War Two will soon break over this remote Bengali village trailing a terrible man-made famine, that corpse-like hand already pollutes the placid river with its intimations of mortality. There is really no need for the complementary image later on in the film when order has...

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