A World of Restless Watchfulness and Nuance

Here is an article about Satyajit Ray from today's NY Times. A festival devoted to his movies (First Light: Satyajit Ray From the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy) opens next week in New York at the Walter Read Theater, Lincoln Center.

I find I am inimical to the idea of making two similar films in succession, wrote the great Indian director Satyajit Ray in 1966, and in this, as in everything he wrote or filmed, he spoke the truth.

At that point, 11 years after the premiere of his first movie, Pather Panchali, he had written and directed 13 features, all of which will be on view at the Walter Reade Theater starting Wednesday, along with seven from the next decade of his career. The films are at least as various as his statement suggests, and you’re not likely to worry, as Ray did in 1966, whether their diversity indicates a restlessness of mind, an indecision, a lack of direction resulting in a blurring of outlook — or if there is an underlying something which binds my disparate works together.

Restless, yes. Blurry, never. And the underlying something, which is simply his bottomless curiosity about how people negotiate the most urgent demands of nature and culture, is impossible to mistake, no matter what kind of Satyajit Ray movie you’re watching.

Some of the films in this series (co-sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Columbia University), like the nutty fairy-tale picaresque Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968), can be a little baffling for non-Indian audiences; nothing travels worse than folk humor. And some might make you feel as if you needed to know a good deal more about the history and politics of the subcontinent — and specifically Ray’s native Bengal, where most of his stories are set — to understand the finer nuances of the characters’ behavior. Ray, however, has nuances to burn: you can miss quite a few and still feel as if you know his people intimately.

The radiant Charulata (1964), for example, takes place in Calcutta in 1880, and its characters, educated and well off, spend a lot of their time in earnest discussion of literature and politics of the day. Their spirited debates are full of names few Westerners will have heard and issues perhaps long forgotten even by Bengalis. What is clear, though, is their fierce passion for ideas, and the small, surprising ways in which that passion colors their feelings for one another.

That’s how dialogue usually works in Ray movies, even ones like Charulata and the superb, Chekhovian ensemble piece Days and Nights in the Forest (1970). Ray is always less interested in what people are saying than why, and in his best pictures the most revealing moments tend to be silent, or nearly so.

The fluid opening sequence of Charulata is six almost-wordless minutes of a woman — the title character, played by the beautiful, fiery-eyed Madhabi Mukherjee — walking rather aimlessly from one room to another in her house. The languid rhythm of her steps tells us how wearily familiar everything seems to her, and the rapt attention she devotes to people passing on the street tells us something sadder still: in her comfortable but unstimulating life, the ordinary activities of ordinary people look exotic, wondrous. She watches everyday life with opera glasses, to feel a little closer.

Ray has a particular affection for the watchful, for patient observers like this lonely wife and like Apu, the child hero of Pather Panchali, who becomes a student in Aparajito (1956) and then a husband and father in The World of Apu (1959), looking at life a little differently at every stage but always looking, searching for clues about who he’s going to be.

The Apu Trilogy is easily Ray’s best-known work, largely by default: few of the films he made between The World of Apu and his death in 1992 are available on DVD in the United States and Britain, and theatrical retrospectives like Lincoln Center’s are, for an artist of his stature, shockingly rare.

This series is full of memorable, affecting movies that have been just about impossible to see in recent years, like Devi (1960), a remarkable exploration of religious madness, and Kanchenjungha (1962), Ray’s first color film. Kanchenjungha chronicles a few hours in the lives of a wealthy Calcutta family vacationing in Darjeeling and manages, with no action more dramatic than strolling and talking, to create a startlingly vivid (and, of course, nuanced) portrait of Indian society in transition.

The films that may resonate most strongly in 2009, though, are the ones that deal with economic hardship and the strange parallel universe that is business, big or small. The grinding rural poverty of Pather Panchali is powerfully rendered, but it’s not entirely typical of Ray’s approach to the vexed question of money and its absence. Abject need is, in a way, too stark, too absolute for his restless sensibility.

He’s more at home with situations like that of the struggling middle-class family of Mahanagar (1963), who have just a bit less income than they require and therefore have to make awkward choices: in this case, the wife (again, Ms. Mukherjee) takes a job, and she discovers that the world outside the home is both more exciting than the world within and much uglier.

Mahanagar has a happy ending, of a highly ambiguous sort. By the time Ray made The Adversary (1971) — the first of what has come to be called the Calcutta Trilogy, though the plots and characters of the three films are unrelated — the economic and political landscape of India had darkened considerably. He had to watch even more closely, and more coldly, to understand this changing world.

The protagonist of The Adversary is a recent university graduate who can’t find a job and is briefly tempted by violent revolution. The second film, Company Limited (1971), is perhaps Ray’s chilliest, bleakest vision of his society, the story of a rising young executive who squirms out of a potentially promotion-killing crisis by devious, dangerous means. He gets the promotion, but there’s a pesky observer in this film, too: his quiet, intelligent sister-in-law, with whom he is slightly in love and who knows, in the end, exactly what he has done in the name of success.

Somnath Bannerjee (Pradip Mukherjee), the hero of the third film, The Middleman (1975), is the most interesting and the most tragic, because he embodies aspects of both his predecessors: unemployed for the first half of the film, and in the second half beginning to succeed as an independent operator in what his mentor calls the order-supply business. The term for his position as a commercial middleman is dalaal, which in Bengali can also mean pimp. He isn’t a villain — hardly any of Ray’s characters are — but he is, as so many in these films are, a young man who lacks the courage to fail in the eyes of the world.

Somnath’s a watcher, watching himself, but not rigorously enough. Even when, as in this picture’s devastating final scenes, he hates the self he is becoming, he can’t stop what he’s doing: it’s as if he were looking at someone else.

And in the audience you watch in melancholy horror because you’re looking through the eyes of Satyajit Ray. The underlying something of his rich, various body of work is, ultimately, a kind of close observer’s faith: if you can see the world clearly enough, you’ll never be a stranger to yourself.


The article is authored by Terrence Rafferty.


(Satyajit Ray)