“Days and Nights in the Forest” Emerges from the Shadows
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.
