ARANYER DIN RATRI

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(Days and Nights in the Forest)

India, 1969

Director: Satyajit Ray

Production: Priya Films; black and white; running time: 115 minutes. Language: Bengali.

Producer: Nepal Dutta, Ashim Dutta; cinematographer: Soumendu Roy, Purnendu Bose; screenplay: Satyajit Ray, based on a novel by Sunil Ganguly; editor: Dulal Dutta; music: Satyajit Ray; production design: Bansi Chandragupta; art direction: Ashoke Bose; sound: Sujit Sarkar.

Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee (Ashim); Subhendu Chatterjee (Sanjoy); Samit Bhanja (Hari); Robi Ghosh (Sekhar); Pahadi Sanyal (Sadashiv Tripathi); Sharmila Tagore (Aparna); Kaberi Bose (Jaya); Simi Garewal (Duli); Aparna Sen (Hari's former lover).

Publications:

Books:

Seton, Marie, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray, Bloomington, 1971.

Robinson, Andrew, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, Berkeley, 1992.

Sarkar, Bidyut, World of Satyajit Ray, Columbia, 1992.

Banerjee, Tarapada, and Satayjit Ray, Satyajit Ray: A Portrait inBlack and White, New York, 1993.

Banerjee, Surabhi, Satyajit Ray: Beyond the Frame, Flushing, 1996.

Das, Santi, editor, Satyajit Ray: An Intimate Master, Flushing, 1998.

Cooper, Darius, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition andModernity, Cambridge, 2000.

Articles:

Milne, Tom, in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 41, no. 1, Winter 1971–1972.

Interview with Satyajit Ray, in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 42, no. 1, Winter 1972–1973.

Paul, W., "Dim Day of a Recent Past," in Village Voice (New York), vol. 18, 12 April 1973.

Kauffmann, S., "Films," in The New Republic (Marion), vol. 168, 21 April 1973.

Schickel, Richard, "Days and Nights in the Art House," in FilmComment (New York), vol. 28, no. 3, May-June 1992.

Ramnarayan, Gowri, "To Western Audiences, the Filmmaker Satyajit Ray is Synonymous with Indian Cinema," in Interview, vol. 22, no. 6, June 1992.

Sengoopta, Chandak, "Satyajit Ray: The Plight of a Third-World Artist," in American Scholar, vol. 62, no. 2, Spring 1993.

Ciment, Michel, and Hubert Niogret, "Satyajit Ray," in Positif (Paris), no. 399, May 1994.

Sragow, Michael, "An Art Wedded to Truth," in The AtlanticMonthly, vol. 274, no. 4, October 1994.

Ganguly, S., "No Moksha: Arcadia Lost in Satyajit Ray's Days andNights in the Forest," in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 19, no. 2, Winter 1994–1995.

Robinson, Andrew, "Works of a Master Made Whole Again," in TheNew York Times, 2 April 1995.

Sen, Amartya, "Our Culture, Their Culture: Satyajit Ray and the Art of Universalism," in The New Republic, vol. 214, no. 14, 1 April 1996.

Corliss, Richard, "From Asia's Film Factories: 10 Golden Greats," in Time International, vol. 154, no. 7/8, 23 August 1999.

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Satyajit Ray always insisted that his films were made first and foremost for his own fellow-Bengalis, adding that foreign viewers, unless exceptionally well up on Bengali language and culture, would inevitably miss a lot of what was going on. Despite such claims, several of Ray's films found more appreciative (and, it could be argued, more perceptive) audiences outside India. One such was Days and Nights in the Forest, widely hailed by Western critics as one of the director's finest films, but received by his compatriots with puzzlement and indifference.

Indian viewers, by all accounts, were put off by the loose-limbed, seemingly random flow of the narrative. "People in India kept saying: What is it about, where is the story, the theme?" Ray observed regretfully in a Sight & Sound interview. "And the film is about so many things, that's the trouble. People want just one theme, which they can hold in their hands." He likened the structure of the film to a fugue, in which different elements appear and reappear developed, interwoven, transformed, and subtly balanced against each other.

The musical analogy is apt. Ray often acknowledged the influence of composers, above all Mozart, along with that of writers and other film-makers, and Days and Nights is his most Mozartian work: likeCosi Fan Tutte or La Nozze di Figaro it treats serious matters in a seemingly light-hearted way. On the surface the mode is comedy of manners. Four middle-class young men from Calcutta take a few days vacation in the forests of Bihar, to the west of Bengal, where they meet another group of city people—elderly father, daughter, and widowed daughter-in-law—as well as beautiful young woman of the local Santhal tribe. There ensues a complex pattern of social cross-currents and tentative relationships. Ashim (played by Soumitra Chatterjee), the most affluent and assured of the young men, is attracted to the poised and intelligent Aparna (Sharmila Tagore). Jaya, the young widow, tries to seduce the shy Sanjoy but humiliatingly fails. Hari, the none-too-bright sportsman, seduces the Santhali woman, Duli, and is badly beaten by one of her fellow-villagers. Sekhar (another of Ray's favourite actors, the roly-poly Robi Ghosh) gambles compulsively and plays the fool.

The heart of the film is the picnic sequence, where the six young Calcuttans sit round and play a memory game in which each player has to choose the name of a famous person and also remember, in sequence, all the previous choices. Subtle, elegantly structured, and delectably funny, the scene discloses a wealth of emotional and psychological detail: like the various members of a sextet, each character reveals him- or herself in the way he or she plays, from Aparna's graceful flute to Sekhar's galumphing bassoon. The scene shows us a process of insight getting under way. By the end of the film each of the young men—with the exception of Sekhar—has experienced a moment of epiphany, brought up short by self-realization. None of them, we can guess, will ever be quite the same again.

But there's also a political dimension to the film. Days and Nights can be seen as a prelude to the three films often grouped together as Ray's "City Trilogy": The Adversary, Company Limited, and The Middleman. In these films Ray engaged, for the first time in his career, the social and political upheavals that were then shaking Bengal, and in Days and Nights he hints at the kind of class- and caste-based attitudes that underlay this unrest. The four young men from the city are not unlikable, but their treatment of the local "tribal" people reveals an unthinking arrogance that at times verges on brutality. Hari, having mislaid his wallet, at once accuses the villager co-opted as their servant of stealing it, and hits him—an injustice which later rebounds on him. Even Ashim, the most intelligent and politically aware of the four, browbeats the caretaker of their bungalow into accepting a bribe, then mockingly comments (in English, significantly), "Thank God for corruption."

As so often in Ray's films, the women come off rather better than the men, being far more adult, sensitive, and attuned to what's going on around them. In particular, Ray uses Sharmila Tagore's cool, intelligent screen persona as the film's moral touchstone (as he would again in Company Limited); it is Aparna who brings home to Ashim the full extent of his thoughtlessness. Having brushed aside as excuses the caretaker's concern about his sick wife, he's taken aback when Aparna suggests he should look for himself—and appalled when he sees that the woman is close to death. It's a moment that anticipates the similar shock felt by the complacent young Brahmin (also played by Soumitra Chatterjee) in Distant Thunder when he registers the ravages of famine on his fellow villagers.

Days and Nights in the Forest marks a transition in Ray's filmmaking career, turning his talents for social comedy, emotional nuance, and quiet, understated irony towards more contemporary concerns. At the same time it demonstrates the subtlety of his narrative control, concealing a carefully devised dramatic shape beneath the seemingly casual flow of everyday life. Far from being shapeless or lacking a theme, as its first audiences imagined, the film is subtly orchestrated throughout: there isn't a scene or incident, barely even a gesture, that doesn't contribute to the overall purpose.

—Philip Kemp