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PAULINE KAEL
own stock company, and anyone who mistook the principal players
in the trilogy for people just acting out their own lives for the camera,
may be startled now to see them in a nineteenth-century mansion.
In the early parts of the trilogy, Ray was able to convince many people
that he had simply turned his cameras on life ; he performs the same
miracle of art on this decadent, vanished period. The setting of
Devi
seems to have been caught by the camera just before it decays. Here,
as in the trilogy, Ray gives us his vision-which is often ironic-of the
disintegration of old ways of life and the development of new.
It
is
a commentary on the values of
our
society that those who
saw truth and greatness in
The Apu Trilogy,
particularly in the opening
film with its emphasis on the mother's struggle to feed the family, are
not drawn to a film in which Ray shows the landowning class and its
collapse of beliefs. It is part of
our
heritage from the Thirties that the
poor still seem "real" and the rich "trivial."
Devi
should, however,
please even Marxists if they would go to see it; it is the most con–
vincing study of upper-class decadence I have ever seen. But it is Ray's
feeling for the beauty within this decadent way of life that makes it
convincing. Eisenstein cartooned the upper classes and made them
hateful; they became puppets in the show he was staging. Ray,
by
giving them the respect and love that he gives the poor and struggling,
helps us to understand their demoralization. The rich, deluded father–
in-law of
De·vi
is as human in his dreamy sensuality as Apu's own poet
father. Neither can sustain his way of life or his beliefs against the new
pressures; and neither can adapt.
Like Renoir and De Sica, Ray sees that life itself is good no matter
how bad it is. It is difficult to discuss art which is an affirmation of
life,
without
fear of becoming maudlin. But is there any other kind of
art, on screen or elsewhere? "In cinema," Ray says, "we must select
everything for the camera according to the richness of its power to
reveal." Aesthetics and morality are more closely interrelated than
many wish to acknowledge: they are inseparable. And that is why when
we see a movie like Jules Dassin's
Phaedra
or
What Ever Happened to
Baby Jan e?
we feel disgust. And we understand Kurosawa's hero, with
his passion for destruction.
Pauline Kael
