By admin 
Four city jerks, privileged and frustrated young men from Kolkata, head to the countryside for a few days of slothful rest and rowdy dissipation. They approach the locals arrogantly, seeing the region’s poverty as a source for cheap, subservient help and an open field for heedless riot, but a series of chance encounters—and romantic entanglements—sends them home shaken and humbled, though maybe not wiser. This is the premise of Satyajit Ray’s 1970 melodrama “Days and Nights in the Forest,” which had long been hard to see until the release, earlier this year, of a 4K restoration, which has now arrived on the Criterion Channel. (It will also be released by the Criterion Collection, on Blu-ray and DVD, on September 29th.) The film is a teeming, turbulent, confrontational meld of emotion and observation, placing the eruptive pressure of societal conflict amid the seeming trivia of social life.
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“Days and Nights in the Forest” is based on an autobiographical novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay, published in 1968. The feature’s literary basis is underlined when two of the men reminisce about a literary journal they founded long ago, but it’s palpable throughout, in the freewheeling actions and impulsive dialogue, which Ray nonetheless films with analytical detachment and gimlet scrutiny—as befits a work of personal experience that, however, isn’t his own but the author’s. (Ray’s critical distance from the characters is as crucial to the movie’s emotional power as is his wide-ranging empathy.) The movie’s anecdotal aspect both abstracts and expands the drama. Ray’s incremental approach to the story elides through lines and plot mechanisms in such a way that the crisscrossing relationships and events form an intellectual map of the forces underlying them.
From the start, there’s something dubiously bookish—callow and potentially callous—about the four men’s rustic jaunt. As Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), who planned the excursion, drives, Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee) reads to the others from the back seat about Palamu, the region where they’re headed. The book he’s reading from leeringly describes the locale’s women as dark-skinned and scantily clad; the four men’s minds are on sex and love. They tease Hari (Samit Bhanja), also in the back seat, about a girlfriend leaving him; he pridefully asserts that he “dumped” her, but a flashback shows what really happened. Sanjoy is similarly teased about his relationship with his boss’s daughter, another source of resentment that shows up in a flashback. Meanwhile, the hyperactive, sardonic Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh), riding shotgun, is unemployed and claims to have no time for the “bourgeois” frivolity of romance.
The melodramatic force of Ray’s film is built into these spare but potent character sketches. Douglas Sirk, Hollywood’s supreme director of melodramas and a theoretician of the genre, spoke of his films’ dependence on the contrast between “immovable” characters and “split” ones. In “Days and Nights in the Forest,” Hari and Sanjoy, in the back seat, are the “split” characters, their flashbacks revealing the division between their present-tense façades and their bitterly remembered realities. Sitting up front, Ashim, who is coolly brazen, and the antic, unreflective Shekhar—the king and the jester—are the “immovable” ones, with unified identities that are nonetheless exposed and vulnerable.
All four are manifestly bourgeois, flashing their cash from the moment they arrive at the village where they are to stay. They blusteringly order a bedraggled local man named Lakha to accompany and serve them. (“Ask if he can come with us,” Sanjoy says to Ashim in English, certain that Lakha won’t understand.) They arrive as self-aware screwups, who know full well that they should have reserved their bungalow in advance but instead hector and bribe the guesthouse’s beleaguered watchman into bending the rules and giving them one anyway. He fears he’ll be fired for it, and one of the travellers—again in English—quips, “Thank God for corruption.”
The men are keen to go slumming. At night, they go drinking at a shedlike bar where women, to their surprise, drink together as heavily as men do. One of the women, Duli (Simi Garewal), noticing the haughty and higher-class men sizing her and her friends up, boldly approaches them for drinking money. The next morning, when the men show up at the local market in search of breakfast, a group of women, including Duli, are there in search of day labor. The men hire three, including Duli, to do their chores. One woman is pressed into service as a punkah wallah, charged with pulling a rope that keeps a hinged ceiling fan flapping back and forth and keeping the men cool. As for Duli, she sweeps the bungalow’s floor with a whisk broom, Hari ogling her as she bends over.
But Hari’s friends have other pursuits in mind. Shekhar brazenly asks Lakha where they can find “middle-class women,” and the poor man obediently points the way. As the four men walk the designated road, they pass a badminton court, where they encounter two women of the local gentry: Rini (Sharmila Tagore), a young, unmarried woman of intellectual ambition and poetic refinement, and her sister-in-law, Jaya (Kaberi Bose), a still youthful widow who is desperately lonely and the mother of a lively young boy. Surprised to encounter urbane menfolk here, the women lead them in a whirl of home visits—Rini’s father, Sadashiv (Pahari Sanyal), is a landowner—and social outings. Gradually, the women’s strong and probing personalities lay bare the weaknesses and presumptions of the ostensibly suitable men in their midst.
The men and women are instantly on familiar terms, and the push and pull of formalities and witticisms creates an atmosphere of brightness and romantic energy, although the household is darkened by tragedy and muffled by isolation. Rini guides Ashim to a small aerie that’s her solitary retreat, with her English-language books and her Western records (including “Rubber Soul” and “Joan Baez in Concert”), but their romantic connection is shadowed by her keen awareness of his cavalier, solipsistic arrogance. Jaya, with little hope of romance, seeks a sexual encounter, in a powerfully ironic scene contrasting the purity of desire with the fretful inhibitions of conventional morality.
As the story unfolds, relationships between friends, transactions with locals and bureaucrats, episodes of love and lust, and moments of painful self-awareness produce a subjective panorama of unredressed inequality, squandered energy, stifling tradition, and a restive quest for liberation. Ray gives his four men a natural exuberance and supplies them with a varied, pugnaciously expansive range of action. Whether in straightforward mealtime banalities or chatter when bathing at an outdoor well, or in the raucous ribaldry of their drunken rambles, they bring high spirits and a hunger for experience, albeit on their own presumptuous terms. Ray approaches the action with a vigorous yet reflective and piercingly probing eye. Observing the four men at the bar, his camera tracks from face to face, pausing at each before passing on, making palpable both connections and disconnections—isolation amid the overheated tumult.
The movie’s romantic centerpiece is a party game that the two women teach the four men during a picnic. It’s a memory game, in which the group sits in a circle, one member says the name of a famous person, and the next one repeats that name and adds another, and so on; those who forget a name are out, until a winner remains. For many movie lovers seeing the film for the first time, the game will be startlingly familiar, as it was more recently played in Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” by a group of scientifically precocious teen-agers. (For that matter, the setup of Ray’s film also prefigures that of Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited.”) For both Ray and Anderson—who was involved in the current restoration and is a long-standing admirer of Ray’s—the demanding game gives rise to high drama and keen suspense along with tender comedy and rapturous romanticism. Both directors make use of its patterned and repetitive format to embody emotional extremes in a precise and formalized array of visual imagination.
The trivial outcome of this friendly competition plays an outsized role in the relationship of Rini and Ashim—a psychological wrangle in which the discerning Rini has the upper hand and lets him know it. (Ray films their climactic confrontation in intense, dual closeups, framed starkly against the sky, that are as indiscreetly intimate as they are sculpturally grand.) There’s another struggle, between Hari and Duli, that’s altogether more troubling, because of the inherent inequality of the relationship—between an educated middle-class man and a desperately poor and unworldly woman of doubtless little schooling who is also in his employ. Ray pays close attention to the fine points of the abusive relationship—including the confusion of emotion and the bedrock of money—and he situates it at the violent edge of class conflict and stifled revolt.
“Days and Nights in the Forest” came near the midpoint of Ray’s career. By 1970, he’d made more than a dozen features since his Neo Realist-inspired début, “Pather Panchali,” from 1955 (the first entry in his Apu trilogy, completed in 1959), and his work ranged from the historicist formalism of “The Music Room” to the ferocious urban feminism of “The Big City” to the time-shifting political modernism of “The Hero” to the antic musical fantasy of “The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha.” (He made his final dramatic feature in 1991, at the age of sixty-nine, the year before his death.) With “Days and Nights in the Forest,” he varies tones and moods widely within one drama as if also turning inward, considering urban intellectuals’ distance from India at large, the differences of experience, background, and identity that make connections either a struggle or an exploitation. His four city dwellers head home with more than just wounds. They bear symbolic souvenirs, physical and verbal, that they, like viewers, ignore at their own moral risk. ♦
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