Distant Thunder, a rare color film by Satyajit Ray, is perhaps the master film-maker's loveliest, but it could take the cake as his most simple-minded and literal….

Ray gets in a few social barbs at the huszling middle class. But while Ray plants the seed for satire, he doesn't go anywhere with it. It's a red herring—the calm before the storm.

After this point the narrative becomes an exposition of the theme: what war does to people, specifically what war does to Ray's innocents who will endure famine although the war never touches them directly. Distant Thunder has been compared with Bergman's Shame but the vivid images matched with heavy metaphors and tired plot bones brings it closer to Cries and Whispers, Bergman's awesome closet drama…. Distant Thunder begins as a fairy tale romance and ends on the same note; there's nowhere the film can go dramatically…. Nevertheless, the film moves forward so sensuously and lyrically and because all Satyajit Ray's films are invariably rubber-stamped with the critical catchword 'humanism', it's no wonder Distant Thunder could appeal to critics as varied as Vincent Canby, Molly Haskell and Pauline Kael….

The ridiculously blunt symbolism comes down with the weight of a sledgehammer. Ray isn't giving an emotional nudge; it's a push. Distant Thunder contains some of Ray's worst ideas since Nayak where the hero, an insecure movie star, dreams of literally drowning in money.

I like Ray because his effects are usually so delicately and economically achieved…. The effects in Distant Thunder are all too obvious….

Again Ray dramatically sets troubled, often confused and ineffective men against strong, instinctive women. Like Bergman he is mistakably in awe of women and shares with Bergman … the tendency for using the most obsessively lovely women set off against physically unattractive men. (p. 38)

Gangacharan's seemingly revealing comment when his wife tells him she has a job, "If we have to humble ourselves, it's best we do it together," is meaningless in the context of the ending. The change is fleeting, transitory. Perhaps it does not occur to them to question the system that sends the harvest the people reaped to far-off armies. In a fairy tale romance like this nothing much has really changed, not the couple's civic outlook and certainly not their plumply sensual appearance; neither is noticeably thinner by the end. They're still sacred cows. They have awakened only to social passivity. Their cock-eyed optimism—a mixture of empty bravery and political indifference—will see them through.

This is strange and disappointing coming from a director whose best films deal with the evolving social conscience, the psychology of change. Even stranger is the affectation of the art house equivalent of the Hollywood gloss. The horrible realism of hunger, emaciation, and death are eclipsed by the hypnotizing poetry of Ray's camera—the drifting lyricism, the white heat, the slowly changing rhythms, the softly colored images, and the floating, exotic sounds of the countryside. According to the reviewers it's the latest thing in ambiguity, as if ugliness is more threatening and hideous if it comes giftwrapped. It achieves the same end—they just starve beautifully, making it so much easier for critics in humanist cloak to be seduced by, rave about and forget. (p. 39)