DEVI MAA (Devatha) Telugu (dubbed into Hindi), 2000 Starring: Meena, Divya Unni, Ramki and Charan Raj Music by Raj Kumar Directed by Ramanarayanan

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    I ordered "Devi Maa" so I could see another film like Naag Shakti: a religious spectacle with lots of otherworldly drama, an evil magician or two, and a spectacularly decked-out goddess who kicks demon butt. I've also wanted to see Meena in a film, and I was interested in experiencing more of what filmmakers in the South have to offer.

    As soon as I saw Meena as green Kali on the front cover I knew I'd found my Halloween costume and I started thinking: where can I buy a Choli around here? If I spray paint a pitchfork gold, will it look like a trishul? How am I gonna find a hat like THAT? My mind was a-whir with schemes for being a scary Green Kali this Halloween...but when I actually watched the film I got nervous. Devi Maa -- in all of her incarnations -- doesn't take things lightly, at least not in the south. She has a strict protocol of devotee behaviour and takes a certain glee in scaring the hell out of those who screw up. In short, Devi Maa is one creepy lady, and you don't want to mess with her.

    The end of the film tries to temper this impression with a few lines of exposition -- you know, the Devi wasn't trying to be scary or cruel, she was just doing what's best for you, blah blah blah -- but my original impression still stands: all of the goddesses played by Meena in this movie are disturbing, and if I find a wild-eyed woman bursting through my kitchen floor and giggling maniacally tomorrow, shaking a drum covered with margosa, I won't be surprised. I've even prepared for this eventuality by stocking up on porridge, but it's very hard to find margosa leaves in this part of the world.

    According to this film margosa leaves are much beloved by the Goddess...she says several times that there is "no better medicine than margosa." I've looked this leaf up on the internet and she seems to be right...one site lists no less than 20 ailments that can be cured by the margosa, everything from asthma to worms. Also we're told repeatedly that the goddess loves to eat porridge (even more than birthday cake!) and there are several scenes in the film which lovingly show Meena gulping down the stuff. As an added bonus to the devotee, after the goddess drinks from a pot of porridge the remaining food will taste like nectar, which "Devi Maa" makes an uncharacteristically light-hearted joke about.

    As you're probably realizing, "Devi Maa" is more an instruction manual for worship -- and a cautionary tale -- than it is a piece of entertainment, but it still manages to be lots of fun to watch. The characters are silly and one-dimensional -- the way they tend to seem in extremely condensed versions of epic stories -- but that never stopped us from enjoying cartoons, right? Adding to the cartoony atmosphere of the film is a wild array of colourful, splashy, and occasionally beautiful computer-generated effects. Unfortunately each effect is shown at least twice, so you get a little sick of watching plants strangle people. What's more, the effects are subsequently shown again -- in reverse -- which creates an intriguing symmetry but becomes tedious. They probably spent so much money on the effects that they just HAD to show them over and over.

    Perhaps the budget allocated for special effects was enough to shave the running time of the film down to 109 minutes. This bothered me in theory, but I quickly realized that "Devi Maa" has enough action for 3 such Indian films -- and it compresses a lot of plot into a very short period of time -- so the length hardly matters. The "blink and you'll miss it" quality of the film -- so rare in Bollywood -- is summed up in this dialogue which occurred between some Bollybob members seeing the film for the first time:

JAY: {Watching the opening credits} Wow, this looks like a good movie.

MUFFY: It is, it'll melt your brain.

MIKE: {Opening styrofoam containers} Here's the channa masala.

JAY: Did we get nan?

MIKE: Yeah.

MUFFY: Let me find some plates.

JAY: {Taking another container from Mike} Is this lamb or chicken?

MIKE: Yaaaaagh! What just happened?!

JAY: Is that a demon?!

MIKE: Who's that? What's he doing?

JAY: That's a plant! And a baby!

MIKE: His head flew off! There's a skeleton!

JAY: Wow!

MIKE: What happened to his eyes???

JAY: I'm confused.

MUFFY: Here are the plates.

    So put down your nan and pay attention to the review, or you might end up as baffled as Mike and Jay were.

    The movie concerns Savitri, an absentminded and amnesiatic housewife who is pregnant with the reincarnation of the Goddess. Apparently, this child is going to grow up to battle demons, though why Savitri was chosen to be the mother is never explained.  The first sign that something is strange about her pregnancy is when, during the ultrasound, the nurses see a trishul in her womb instead of a baby.  The nurses decide this is "strange."  She is wisely advised by the hospital staff to go to the temple and pray.

    But Savitri doesn't have much of a praying instinct. She refuses to wear a suggested margosa-leaf sari in the temple because she thinks it's silly. Exhibiting a strong-arm method of coercion that Devi Maa becomes known for later in the film, Savitri's clothes burst into flame, and the goddesses' avatar -- a mysterious flower-seller -- does a wild-eyed, leaf-shaking dance to explain why margosa leaves are so special, and why her devotees should wear them. This would be enough to scare most people into submission -- a fear of being set on fire can do a lot to a person -- but not Savitri...she swears to give the goddess her mangalsutra if she gives birth to a healthy child, and then forgets about the deal entirely.  Savitri forgets a lot of things in this movie.  Fortunately, there's a gigantic, noisy, vengeful goddess around to jog her memory.

    After the arrival of her child and a few scary visits from Durga, Savitri remembers her promise and goes to the temple to pay her debt. If she'd just give away the mangalsutra everything would be fine, but she's reluctant to part with the precious ornament and her husband makes an interesting point: when you go to jail you're given the option of serving time in prison OR paying a fine, so why can't Savitri keep her mangalsutra and give a different offering instead? Savitri -- both forgetful and sneaky -- falls for this dubious logistical hair-splitting.  On the verge of putting a different piece of jewellery into Devi Maa's charity basket, Savitri accidentally drops her infant daughter in instead, which is unintentionally funny because you'd think a mother would know better.   This adds the adjective "clumsy" to the list of Savitri's less positive character traits.

    The frightened parents retrieve their daughter and are about to take her away but the priests of the temple tell her that the child -- like anything dropped into the charity basket -- automatically belongs to the goddess. This is a hard and fast rule of the temple that the priests are unwilling to concede.  Moreover, the goddess appears to agree with this judgment, as an intriguing experiment with snakes shows.  Much to her detriment Savitri disagrees, though her husband doesn't seem to care much one way or another. They make their escape and move to a new city to avoid the goddess's wrath (another technique for escaping might have been to convert to another religion, but this is option never comes up).

    Skip a few years and now the child -- Satya -- is a young girl. She speaks in a crazy voice that is obviously an older woman trying to sound like a child -- and doing a very poor job -- but otherwise she's cute as a button. Except for the occasional snake attack the family hasn't been harassed by Devi Maa for years, so they think they're safe.

    But there's a demon out to get the daughter. His name is Prince, because he's the "Prince of Evil." You can tell he's evil because he wears a red jumpsuit with smiling cartoon devils on it and he has the number "666" shaved into the back of his head, but for some reason Savitri's husband overlooks this...in fact, he calls upon Prince in the hope that he can stop the Goddess from harassing them.   But make no mistake, Prince is not a nice guy.  He does disturbing parlour tricks in restaurants that I think he learned from Doug Henning (who would, by extension, be the "King of Evil."). He lives in an abandoned disco and does his dirtier deeds by sending out his giggling lackeys with murderous flowers. While it should be easy to kill a small child -- it happens all the time -- Prince and his henchmen have a terrible time killing little Satya, thanks to the benevolence of the Goddess.

    So the movie is really a triangle of struggles: a struggle between Savitri and the goddess for the ownership of little Satya, and a struggle between Prince and the goddess for the safety of the child. It's obvious right off the bat that Devi Maa has more power in one of her hennae'd little fingers than Prince has in his entire stocky (apparently invisible) torso, but you know those demons...they keep trying. They even manage to melt Satya at one point, but this results in Prince's zaniest henchman getting killed by a ceiling fan.  In her battles with evil, Devi Maa -- as green Kali, usually -- is just as ruthless and scary as she is with her devotees.

    Some reviewers have complained about Meena's portrayal of the Goddess, but I disagree...in a film totally devoid of any character depth or development, she fits right in as a wide-eyed, easily-angered cartoon character.  This is the first time I've seen Meena in a film and she handles her role well, by turns vicious and touching in a silly sort of way that is in keeping with the rest of the movie.  This was also a first for Meena, who has never played a goddess before, and this sort of thing is apparently a dream for many Indian starlets.  Congrats, Meena, though it's unfortunate that your name translates into English as "fish."

    Devi Maa continues to insist that she has rights to the child. No matter how much Savitri tries to keep her daughter away from danger -- or rather, away from anybody who isn't related to her --  the scary goddess just keeps showing up...as a flower seller, as a toy statue, and -- most disturbingly -- as Satya's new teacher. It's at this point that Satya wears a margosa leaf sari to her birthday party and serves porridge to the baffled guests instead of birthday cake, which gives us some keen insight into the public humiliation of a family whose child has joined a cult.  Though I suspect that Satya was already a troubled child because -- judging by the guests at her birthday party -- all of her friends are in their late 30's.

    Largely unrelated to this power struggle is a pious, jolly guy who makes sandals and dispenses wisdom to passers-by. He really loves the goddess -- one might say he is her biggest fan, if anybody keeps track of such things -- and he donates a large portion of his earnings to her.  The injustice is that he's continually beaten up by the priests in her temple, especially when he sneaks in at night to put a pair of sandals on her statue, which most priests consider sacrilegious.

    By way of apology, the goddess disguises herself and stops by his hovel for a visit, and he impresses her with this wisdom:

     "A man once asked me, 'how will they ever paint that gigantic airplane?' I told him that when the plane is flying high in the sky, it will look very small, and it can be painted with a tiny brush."

    The goddess is impressed.  Or rather, it becomes apparent that one of the most endearing  traits of a goddess is her ability to patronize foolish people. She even allows herself to be tricked into staying at the guy's hovel for an entire month, and she shows her appreciation for his hospitality (or rather, his porridge) by giving him a bed made out of snakes. The goddess gets along with snakes very well and sometimes uses them as umbrellas. She even turns into a snake and sings a song at Satya's birthday party about how devoted mothers should give their children away to goddesses who look like snakes, which doesn't cut any ice with Savitri but convinces her husband and child.

    I should point out that the husband is a typically clueless Bollywood / Tollywood dad, the kind that always appears in movies where women are the primary characters. The filmmakers seemed to have no idea what to do with him, and only put him into the film because it was easier than finding an excuse for him not being there. One of the more hilarious points in the movie occurs at Satya's birthday party, when Devi Maa and Savitri sing an aggressive duet about the ownership of Satya, and the husband waves at somebody off camera and just walks away. That sums up how much concern the makes of "Devi Maa" had for the poor guy...he can't be a part of the pivotal song, and any excuse is good enough to get rid of him.

    Meanwhile, little Satya is totally besotted with the goddess, and why not?  Next to the calm, loving, protective demeanor of Devi Maa, Savitri comes off as a hysterical basket-case...what's more, a basket-case who screwed everything up because she made a promise she decided not to keep.  That's not to say that Savitri's a bad mom, just that she's selfish, dim-witted, and overwrought.  Oh yes, and clumsy.  And manipulative: she tries to form a truce by pouring milk over the goddess's head, which is something I wouldn't recommend you do to a person who isn't a goddess.  Devi Maa realizes this for the ploy that it is -- bribery -- and returns the milk in a miracle of reverse photography.

    The goddess continues to be much cooler than Savitri by giving Satya a "Rock Saxophone" for her birthday, and the little girl drives her mother crazy by playing devotional songs on it all the time (not only does this kid have a terrifying voice, but her sax sounds like a cheap keyboard). To keep her from being further influenced by the goddess, Savitri keeps her daughter isolated from everybody, and this gives Prince a chance to come back and steal her.

    There is, of course, a final duel. Savitri must engage in a series of mortifications in order to get the help of Devi Maa -- including walking on coals and being rolled along the ground by a group of strange women -- and she is finally rewarded...Kali shows up just in time to kill Prince's gigantic viking skeleton (who looks a bit like something you'd see on an 80's heavy metal album cover) and also impale Prince in a scene stolen from the Matrix (but with a trishul instead of a gun).  This final confrontation is pretty spectacular, though there's only so many times you can watch the same shot of the Viking skeleton walking before your mind begins to wander.  I'm thankful that this is one of the few CGI sequences that couldn't be shown in reverse as well.

    After 109 minutes the film ends and you're left feeling a little dazed...not only does Devi Maa possess all the best Indian movie craziness, but it condenses it, throws in computer graphics, and adds a lot of explicit religion.  The result: exhausting entertainment, and a strong sense -- for me at least -- of peeking into an exotic reality that is leagues beyond the sort of beliefs I was brought up with.  Hindu mythology is pure adventure, that's for sure, and Devi Maa manages to distill this sense of adventure and wonder into an extremely quirky -- and extremely demented -- little film.  What also comes across is a strong sense of duty: if you say you're going to do something, you'd better do it.  If you have a responsibility, you'd better perform it.  If you don't fulfill your obligations, simply saying "sorry" isn't enough: it's been permanently recorded, and some heavy mortification is required to get out of the hole you've dug for yourself.

    So, spectacular as it is, the battle with Prince takes second place to the main theme of the film: good worshippers should fulfill their duties.  As Durga says at some point in the film, things would be so much easier if people kept their promises. But if all of us kept our promises there'd be no room for gigantic computer-generated Viking skeletons, and what sort of boring life would that be?

 

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