When I was 16 years old, I saw my first foreign film in the only art theater in the Bronx. It was the first part of Satyajit Ray’s brilliant the Apu Trilogy: “Pather Panchali” (1955). Ray’s film was a lyrical and realistic depiction of the childhood hardships of the central figure Apu and his elder sister Durga living amid the pain of rural Indian poverty. I had never seen a film like it, being limited to watching exclusively Hollywood films before then. It was a film without a false note or any artifice. So, it was a revelation. In college I began to watch the French New Wave and Bergman, Bunuel, Fellini, and Antonioni films more often than I looked at Hollywood’s less personal and more generic product. The foreign films didn’t only give me pleasure—they altered my way of seeing.
For the next two weeks, a Ray film from 1970, “Days and Nights in the Forest,” is playing at the Film Forum in New York City. I have not seen the film since it came out, but I have fond memories of it.
The delicate, quiet, unaffected “Days and Nights in the Forest” follows four worldly, middle-class men from Calcutta on holiday together in the countryside, where the unfamiliar environment reveals uneasy truths about each of them. Asim (Soumitra Chatterjee, a regular Ray actor) is handsome and confident and self-absorbed. The group see themselves as privileged and treat the watchman as a servant who should meet their every wish and are unable to pay attention to the fact that he keeps on mentioning his wife is sick. They are no better in their behavior with the other tribal and lower-caste members they encounter. The caste system reigns in 1970 India. The short, comic Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh) compensates for being the least successful of his friends by trying too hard to be funny. The angry, sulking Hari (Samit Bhanja) is a cricketer who suffers much emotional pain being dumped by a woman who finds his love letters too shallow. The fourth, Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), works in management at a mill, but he nurtures the notion that he is destined for a less prosaic, conventional life, that there are deeper, more intellectual things that lie in his future.
The men drink heavily at night, tend to needle each other, and are not satisfied with their lives. They meet two middle-class woman: sophisticated, reflective, enigmatic Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law Jaya (Kaberi Bose). The women strike up a friendship with the men, inviting them for meals and games (badminton), yielding a long, subtly rendered scene depicting them playing a memory game.
Only one relationship becomes somewhat romantic: the compassionate, complex, and observant Aparna and the much more superficial Ashim.
Hari pursues a tribal woman for sex and gets mugged, and in one of the film’s most poignant and emotionally powerful scenes, Jaya speaks bitterly about being a ghost, a widow, who sees her life having no future. She reaches out to Sanjoy, but he cannot deal with her pain and flees. Clearly, in Ray’s film, the women are more aware of themselves than the boyish men, who themselves are not totally blind to their own flaws.
“Days and Nights in the Forest” is not on the same emotional and lyrical level as the Apu Trilogy. It is a lighter, less evocative film, but it is a subtle and wise work.
