The Music Room (1958)

****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray is probably best known for the three films in his Apu trilogy made in the late 1950s, and rightly so. But in 2008 when French directors, critics, and industry executives put together their list of the 100 best films for Cahiers du Cinéma, surprisingly, the one work of Ray's that appeared on the list (at #20) was his little-known 1958 film The Music Room, made between the second and third parts of the Apu trilogy. One of the reasons for this unexpected choice might be the subject of the film, the passing of one era and the dawning of another, a subject of perennial appeal in literature and film and one the French seem particularly drawn to. Another reason might be Ray's attitude toward the subject, which he presents without the sentimentality or nostalgia it so often inspires.

The main character—really the only major character—in the film is Huzur Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas, whose brilliant, moody performance is the film's anchor), a zamindir or landlord, whom we first meet sitting in his dressing gown smoking a hookah on the roof of his dilapidated palace overlooking the land that once belonged to his family. He is one of the last of a class of hereditary landowning gentry living off the income produced by their property. It is the 1920s, and just as in the West during the previous century, a massive redistribution of wealth and redefinition of social class is occurring. People like the Huzur (this is how others in the film refer to him) are being replaced by upwardly mobile entrepreneurs who create their own wealth rather than inheriting it. Unable to continue their genteel lifestyle any other way, these fading aristocrats gradually sell off their land to the enterprising upstarts who are replacing them as the new elite in a world where status is no longer defined by social class, but by wealth.

As the movie opens, Huzur receives a letter inviting him to the sacred thread ceremony—a Hindu rite of passage for teenage boys—of the son of a neighbor, Ganguli. Offended that the invitation has not been issued in person, as Huzur considers appropriate to his social position, he refuses to go. Sitting on the roof, he recalls his own son's sacred thread ceremony, his reverie becoming an extended flashback lasting for the first half of the film which Ray uses as a device to show how Huzur came to be in these circumstances and how he became such a disheveled wreck of a man. The flashback begins with Huzur interviewing the obsequious Ganguli, the son of a moneylender, who wants to lease Huzur's land on the nearby river bank to set up a sand quarrying business. Huzur agrees because he needs the money to pay for his own son's lavish sacred thread ceremony.

Huzur is an idle, imperious man whose one passion is music. His obsession is his jalsaghar or music room, which doubles as a shrine to his ancestors, where he spends his time gloating on his family's past glory while smoking his hookah, reading poetry, playing music, and teaching his son to love these dilettantish pursuits as he does. He is also a proud and vain man, and a wholly intractable one. Over the next few years, as the fortunes of Ganguli rise and his own decline, he becomes even more obdurate in his sense of class entitlement. Time and again his pride and vanity drive him to do foolish and self-destructive things in his attempts to preserve what he sees as the superior status he has inherited. He upstages Ganguli's plans to give a jalsa (concert) on a feast day, seeing this as a usurpation of his right as a landowner, by impulsively scheduling a concert on the same day, even though he must pawn his wife's jewelry to finance it. He pays dearly for his triumph, though, with the deaths of his wife and son, a loss that causes him to seal up the music room and retreat inside his house.

When the music from the sacred thread ceremony of Ganguli's son draws Huzur out of his reverie and back to the present, the first thing he determines to do is reopen the music room, in a sorry state after being unused for years. When Huzur first enters the room, the camera follows his gaze around the shabby room, its carpets, bookcases, family portraits, and ornate chandelier covered in dust and spiderwebs. Walking up to a mirror, he is clearly shocked at his raddled appearance, reaching up to touch his face in disbelief. Music begins to well up on the soundtrack, as though playing in his memory. It is not his love of music reasserting itself, though, but rather his old arrogance and conceit. Still locked in rivalry with Ganguli, he suddenly decides to give another jalsa the next night to celebrate the music room's reopening. The concert is a success, but as in the previous concert, Huzur's almost manic sense of triumph ultimately leads to tragedy.

Huzur was hardly the first of Ray's characters to be petty and unlikable. All of Ray's films I've seen have characters that are in some way unsympathetic, although these people are never portrayed as outright malevolent. In Pather Panchali and Aparajito, the two films in the Apu trilogy that preceded The Music Room, for example, Apu's mother was often petulant and spiteful and his father a feckless dreamer. But the young Apu was a balancing force in those movies, his innocence and good nature offsetting unattractive qualities of some of the other characters. The Music Room, however, is essentially built around one person, and while he is not actively malicious, his churlish pride invariably brings harm to himself and others. I can't think of another Ray film where the focus is such an alarmingly self-centered character with so few redeeming features.

In his inflexibility and egotism, Huzur is a pathetic man, yet Ray treats him, as he does each character in all of his films, with the detachment and objectivity of a neutral observer. He doesn't try to explain or judge him, nor does he try to elicit unearned sympathy for him by portraying him as a victim. Still there is plainly a sense of fatalism in The Music Room. Huzur finds himself in a certain historical and cultural situation, and his nature causes him to react to that situation in a particular way. There is also a definite element of tragedy to the film. Like the characters in classical tragedy, Huzur is wholly lacking in self-awareness, and in his willfulness and blind arrogance is responsible for his ill fortune. Just as Huzur lacks sympathetic traits to temper the negative qualities in his character, the film also lacks the hopefulness that balances the tragedy in the typical Ray film, giving it a bleaker, more downbeat view of life than is the norm for Ray's work.

All this might sound quite literary, and I've written before of how strongly literature seems to inform the work of Ray. Yet despite its literary and thematic underpinnings, The Music Room has the great visual power only a master like Ray can give a film. Both of the jalsas, with their effortless synthesis of music, performance, and narrative, are tremendously sensuous set pieces. The sequence where Huzur emerges from his house after four years of seclusion is also a marvel, with Huzur seeing for the first time how much of his land has been washed away in a flood—virtually right up to the foundations of the house—as three of Ganguli's trucks rumble by in a cloud of dust. "Washed away, everything is washed away," he says, stunned, and he might be talking not just about his land, but about everything in his life.

Ray had an acute sense of the visual effect of settings, and both Huzur's decaying palace sitting in the midst of a vast expanse of naked sand and that music room, a precisely detailed representation of both the transience of the material and the transcendence of art, are impossible to forget. It's no arbitrary choice that the film opens with the credits over the music room's magnificent chandelier shown swaying in the dark with no other details of the room visible. Nor that the last big sequence of the film, the jalsa Huzur gives to mark his return from seclusion, ends with the candles in the chandelier guttering one by one after the guests have left, until finally all are extinguished and the room is in darkness as it was at the very beginning of the film. "All lights are out," Huzur mutters dispiritedly, and both he and the viewer realize how unlikely it is they will ever shine again.

The Song of the Little Road (2003)

Country: US
Director: Priyanka Kumar

Priyanka Kumar's documentary on the Indian director Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) is named in honor of the English translation of the title of Ray's first film, Pather Panchali. The seventy-minute long documentary approaches Ray's career and legacy from several angles, using interviews with experts in various fields of film studies as well as brief excerpts from Ray's films. Ray's movies are examined by Peter Rainer, film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and past president of the National Society of Film Critics, and by director Martin Scorsese, whose commitment to film preservation is well known. Both of these men, ardent admirers of Ray, offer genuinely perceptive observations about his work, in particular the great early films, which are the focus of The Song of the Little Road.

Typically, Scorsese approaches Ray from the point of view of his own personal relationship to Ray's films. Of watching the entire Apu trilogy in one sitting, Scorsese says that it "was one of the great cinema experiences" of his life and was a direct inspiration for his own early films, explaining how his realization that Ray was able to make stories so "foreign" seem "personal" made him see that he could do the same thing with the world he grew up in and was familiar with. Rainer enthusiastically calls Ray "the complete filmmaker" and credits his rediscovery of Ray's films with changing his mind about giving up film criticism as a career because of his disenchantment with contemporary movies. The two men discuss many of the most important elements of Ray's work: his humanism, the "introspective" and "meditative" quality of his films, his affinity for telling stories from a child's point of view, the almost documentary simplicity of his technique, his seamless integration of music and narrative. Interestingly, both point out the resemblance of his movies to literature: Scorsese compares watching the Apu trilogy to "reading a two thousand page novel," while Rainer observes that Ray "really does give you the kind of richness and complexity that you get from great literature."

The documentary also uses interviews with personal friends of Ray like Ismail Merchant and musician Ravi Shankar to give us a sketch of Ray the man. We learn of his modest lifestyle and of his gregariousness and sense of humor, as well as his fascination with the arts of all kinds. (His small apartment in Calcutta was virtually a salon for lovers of cinema, literature, music, and art.) We also learn of the financial problems of his film career, which were so great that he had to write novels to support his family because he earned so little from his movies. Most of the early films were made for only around sixty thousand dollars but were nevertheless difficult to finance because they were not popular in India. It was really only the success of his films with foreign audiences that allowed Ray to keep working. So great was his love of his native Bengal, though, that he turned down many offers to work abroad after he became a festival and art-house favorite, preferring to make modest movies about Bengal even if it meant scraping together financing, working with primitive equipment, and knowing that his films would never be popular at home.

Michael Pogorzelsky, director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences archives (Ray received an honorary award from the Academy in 1992, less than a month before his death) and film restorer David Sheppard offer some fascinating insights into the subject of film preservation and the challenges of restoring Ray's films. By the time a restoration project was begun in the 1990s, few prints of Ray's early films remained. Not only had the negatives been used to make so many prints that they were essentially worn out, but the humid climate of Bengal had caused severe damage, causing a progressive process of chemical decomposition called "the vinegar syndrome" because of the strong smell of vinegar the damaged film gives off. After a set of negatives in good condition was discovered and sent to London, they were destroyed in a fire before any significant work could be done. The restorers were then forced to rely on assembling new prints from bits and pieces obtained from various sources, a process further complicated by the fact that only prints without subtitles could be used. Given these difficulties, it seems almost miraculous that the restoration project was able to be completed. I have seen the restored prints of the Apu trilogy sponsored by the Merchant and Ivory Foundation that resulted from the project and although not absolutely perfect, they are quite acceptable, especially compared to the much poorer quality prints of Ray's films from other sources.

My one reservation about The Song of the Little Road is that the interviews are illustrated not by live footage of the person being interviewed, but by stills apparently taken from the interview footage, giving the film a rather static quality at times. However, this is certainly offset by the excellence of the commentary and the power of the excerpts from Ray's films, which seem particularly well chosen to illustrate the point being made. All in all, The Song of the Little Road, which is distributed by NEHST Studios, is without question essential viewing for anyone interested in Satyajit Ray. Click here for more information.

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Laurie Pederson of NEHST kindly sent me a review copy of The Song of the Little Road after reading my post on Ray's Aparajito and The World of Apu, the second and third films in the Apu trilogy.

Aparajito (1956) / The World of Apu (1959)

Aparajito
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

The World of Apu
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) is one of my favorite movies of all time. Based on the autobiographical first novel by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (Banerjee), it is the story of Apu, a young boy living in the impoverished countryside of Bengal in India in the early part of the twentieth century. Pather Panchali is one of the great movies about childhood, a film that at the same time graphically depicts a land and way of life wholly alien to most Americans and that also introduced the music of Ravi Shankar to the West. "Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen," wrote Pauline Kael about the film. I've waited for years to see the two sequels to Pather Panchali based on Bandopadhyay's second novel, Aparajito, films that pursue the story of Apu into his teenage years and young adulthood. I was recently able to see them at last, and the wait was certainly worth it, confirming my intuition based on seeing only a handful of his movies that Ray (1921-1992) was one of the greatest of all film directors.

Pather Panchali ends with the departure of Apu and his parents from their home in the countryside for a new life in the city. Aparajito picks up the story with their arrival in the holy city of Benares. Here Apu's father, a poet and priest, hopes to have greater opportunity to practice his profession, and spends much time on the banks of the Ganges teaching religion and reciting his poetry. Life is not much better for the family in Benares than it was in the country, though, as they continue to struggle against adversity and poverty. Apu's father has many competitors in the holy city, and his mother does not really seem at home in her new urban environment. The city does, however, prove to be an exciting place for young Apu, giving him many opportunities to observe people more colorful, and to visit places more exotic, than those of his former rural life.

The young Apu explores Benares

But not long after their arrival in Benares, Apu's father falls ill with a fever and dies, and Apu and his mother must return to the countryside. Here Apu develops a lifelong passion for education after he is allowed to attend the village school. At one point, he is presented with a tiny globe as a prize for his outstanding performance on his exams, a globe that he keeps with him always, a symbol of the craving for knowledge and experience that becomes the driving force in his life. An exceptional student, he is offered a scholarship to attend secondary school in Calcutta. The second half of the film details Apu's teenage years as a student in Calcutta, where he attends classes by day and works in a printing press at night to earn his living expenses.

The teenage Apu (with his globe) arrives in Calcutta to begin his studies

During this time, it is clear that Apu's mother is deeply affected by his absence and that Apu on his part experiences great conflict between his devotion to education and the concern he feels about leaving his mother. Trains become a recurrent reminder for both the boy and his mother of the hardships of their separation. Many times a train passes by in the background as his mother stands outside, and several scenes take place in trains as Apu travels between Calcutta and the country during his school holidays. For his mother the trains serve as both a hopeful image of Apu's infrequent visits and a melancholy portent of his inevitable departure, while for Apu they come to represent his divided existence, in the country as a dutiful son and in Calcutta as an independent, ambitious young man. Aparajito ends with two nearly simultaneous events that determine the direction of Apu's future—the death of his mother and his graduation from secondary school. He is now free to leave his former life completely behind and begin a new life as a permanent resident of Calcutta and student at the university there.

The World of Apu is a less diffuse film than Aparajito, most of it taking place in a relatively brief span of time. Apu is now a grown man, a university student. (Apu is brilliantly played by 24-year old Soumitra Chatterjee, in his first movie role. He would go on to appear in fourteen more of Ray's films.) Forced by his financial situation to quit school just before he graduates, Apu is a dreamer, a young man who habitually avoids responsibility and can't seem to focus on the mundane, practical side of life, like getting a job and paying his rent, preferring instead to work on his novel. When his best friend and university classmate Pulu gets in touch with him and takes him out for dinner, on the way home Apu breaks into an exuberant ode to freedom and spontaneity. Pulu tells him he acts like he has been drinking, and Apu is in a sense drunk—on the simple joy of being alive.

Pulu's friendship becomes instrumental to Apu's future when he invites Apu to come with him to the countryside where his wealthy family lives, for during this visit Apu meets his future bride, Pulu's cousin Aparna. The marriage is a sudden one, essentially an arranged marriage, and at first the newlyweds barely know each other. In time, though, as they develop a deep love for one another, Aparna becomes the catalyst for profound changes in Apu's casual and self-indulgent attitude to life.

The adult Apu and Aparna

Apu's life undergoes another radical change when Aparna dies giving birth to their son, Kajal. Overwhelmed by grief, Apu rejects his newborn son, leaving him with Aparna's family, and spends the next several years wandering India in a state of intense depression. He even gives up writing the novel he has been working on for so long and one day on the top of a mountain impulsively tosses its pages into the wind, and watches impassively as they flutter away, an evocative reminder of the way youthful dreams and ambitions can be so drastically altered by time and circumstance. Five years later Pulu locates Apu working in a coal mine in an isolated mountain community and persuades the reluctant Apu to return to Bengal with him and finally meet his son. The reunion is an uneasy one for both father and son, but when Apu sees how little love Kajal receives from Aparna's aged parents, he leaves, taking Kajal with him. Recognizing that his son's needs are more important than his own sense of loss, Apu at last grows beyond his despair and finds in his role as a father a new meaning to his life.

Apu and Kajal embark on a new life together

So many powerful themes are concentrated in the Apu trilogy that it's difficult to know where to begin a discussion of them. Perhaps a good place to start is with the universality of these films. Taken together, they cover nearly three decades in the life of one man, telling the story of one individual set in the context of a specific time—the early twentieth century—and a specific and quite distinctive culture. Yet it is a story whose essentials transcend the boundaries of place and time, for it is largely a story of change and growth, what psychologists call individuation, or the development of a person's unique and individual identity. It is the story of the transitions in Apu's life—from a rural agrarian way of life to a modern urban life in a commercial economy, from following the traditional family vocation in the priesthood to finding a new role in life as a scholar and writer, from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adulthood and eventually parenthood, from the self-absorption of immaturity to the selflessness elicited by the transformative power of love.

Yet concurrent with the idea of the constant flux of life is the theme of its continuity. Water, that simple and archetypal symbol of life's flowing continuity, is an image that appears time and again in these films. One of the most memorable sequences in Pather Panchali occurs when the monsoon finally arrives and ends the drought, as torrents of rain drench the parched landscape. The holy River Ganges is a vivid image in Aparajito. In The World of Apu, Aparna's family lives near a large river, and the last scene in the film is of Apu leaving Aparna's family home with Kajal on his shoulders and a smile on his face, walking beside that river as he follows its current towards the sea.

Another important element in these films is the notion of the cyclical nature of life and the way opposing forces in life tend to balance each other, concepts found in many Eastern religions and philosophies. The films are punctuated by birth and death, departure and return, separation and reunion, alienation and reconciliation. In each of the three films death is a significant event, yet loss is always balanced by regeneration: The deaths of Apu's sister and his elderly aunt in Pather Panchali are balanced by the prospect of a new beginning for the family that concludes the film. Aparajito is framed by the deaths of Apu's father at the beginning and of his mother at the end, yet in this film Apu's appetite for knowledge is awakened and he begins the process of forging a new identity for himself. The World of Apu is dominated by the devastating loss of Aparna, yet it also includes the birth of Kajal, with whom Apu is reunited at the end of the movie as he begins yet another phase of his life. By the end of the cycle of films, life has come full circle: one small boy has grown to manhood, and the story continues with his own son, now about the same age as Apu in Pather Panchali.

Satyajit Ray—like John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Jean Renoir—is often called a humanist filmmaker. It's a designation that seems wholly justified, for Ray shares with those other esteemed directors a set of traits that I would say are characteristic of that rather nebulous label: the universality of his themes, the emphasis on characters and how they relate to nature and the world around them, his fascination with the ways in which people in specific circumstances react to those circumstances and interact with one another, and his dispassionate acceptance of the fact that both the noblest and the most petty drives coexist in human nature. All of these traits are plainly displayed in the Apu trilogy, as glorious and moving a celebration of the complexities of human experience as can be found in all of cinema.

Charulata (1964)

****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

In colonial Calcutta in 1879 a young married woman named Charulata lives the sheltered, pampered life of the idle rich. She spends her days in an opulent house—a traditional two-story dwelling built around an open courtyard but furnished in the style of Victorian Britain—playing cards, doing embroidery, and reading romantic novels, her needs seen to by servants. Her husband, Bhupati, who is several years older than Charu, is completely occupied with publishing his political newspaper. Charu's boredom and loneliness and the distance between her and her husband are established in the first sequence of the film as she listens attentively to the street noises outside for signs that he is returning home. Each time she hears someone passing, she runs to the window, flicks open the shutters, and peers at the passerby through a pair of opera glasses. Finally Bhupati arrives home—and goes directly to his study with a book in his hand while Charu looks on in silence from down the corridor. Later that evening he tells her that a young cousin who has recently graduated from university, a relative so close that Bhupati calls him "Brother," is coming to stay and asks her, "You feel lonely, don't you, Charu?" "I've got used to it," she answers.

The lonely Charu finds the playful, high-spirited cousin, 23-year old Amal, a poet and musician and student of literature, a fascinating antidote to her sober, unimaginative husband. Basking in the attention Amal shows her—discussing poetry, music, and literature with her, singing to her, sitting with her in the garden while he writes poetry, encouraging her to take up writing—she soon develops a romantic passion for him, which she believes he secretly returns. When he reveals that Bhupati is paying him to "educate" her, she is crushed. Then when his poetry is accepted for publication, she is devastated by the prospect that he might be lured away from the household by literary ambition and in frustration takes up his suggestion that she write about events from her life. So good is her writing that Amal begins to see her in a new light, finding himself attracted to her.

Adapted by Ray from a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata shows Ray's decidedly literary approach to cinema, with a carefully engineered plot, characters of great complexity, and clearly delineated themes. All three main characters are memorably conceived and interpreted, but this is really Charu's story, a sort of pre-Women's Lib feminist tale of an unfulfilled young woman's initiation into consciousness. By the end of the film, Charu has experienced liberation of her emotions and her creative impulse and has reached a new understanding with her husband, each now more aware, and respectful, of the other's needs. Encircling this story is Ray's perennial fascination with the dialectic of opposing forces in life—politics and art, intellect and emotions, the outside world and the inner lives of individuals. At one point Amal turns philosophical: "Birth and death. Day and night. Joy and sadness. Unification and separation." Each of these things exists, he tells Charu, because of its opposite. That idea seems to sum up Ray's humanistic view of the way the oppositions in life, and the oppositions of human personalities, play against each other but in the end inevitably reach a state of equilibrium, each complementing and sustaining its opposite.

In Charulata Ray takes his style further into experimentation than one might expect from his earlier work. At one point, Charu comes into the room to find Amal sitting at the piano playing and singing a tender love song that begins, "I know you, I know you, O foreigner." Within a few moments the scene has become a dreamy musical interlude, the piano replaced with an offscreen orchestra, and Amal singing directly to Charu, ending the song with a spontaneous alteration of the opening line of the lyric: "I know you, I know you, O sister-in-law." Charu reacts to Amal's performance with the rapture of a woman being serenaded by her beloved. In this stylized sequence, a directorial flight of fancy in an otherwise realistic film, Ray seems to enter into Charu's mind, showing an embellished version of reality colored by her romantic longings.

Ray also experiments with photography and editing. The camera seems to move and track a great deal. Several times Ray discreetly zooms toward or away from an object. When Charu is sitting in a swing in the garden, the camera swings back and forth with her. He also uses the subjective camera at a couple of conspicuous points, one time when the characters are looking through a kaleidoscope and again during that love song when Amal is stepping towards Charu in rhythm to the song and we briefly see her from his point of view, the camera jarring at each step. And when Charu finally sits down to write her autobiographical story, superimposed over her face is a brief montage of scenes from her childhood, scenes that suggest a more rural and less privileged background than that of her husband.

Twenty years later Ray returned to the same themes in The Home and the World (1984), a movie with many similarities to Charulata and also adapted from a novel by Tagore. (Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Amal in Charulata, would take the role of the neglectful older husband in the later film.) As much as I like The Home and the World, I have to admit that Charulata strikes me as a more passionate, adventurous, and emotionally involving film, one of the best I've ever seen by Ray, very close in quality and appeal to Pather Panchali, one of my favorite movies of all time. (One caveat: although the version I got from Netflix, released by Bollywood Films Ltd., has an adequate film transfer, there are many annoying shortcomings in the subtitles—the most amusing of which is calling the Liberal Party the Libel Party—that you have to be prepared to bear with.)

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For more about the life and films of Satyajit Ray, see the website Satyajit Ray World.