Days and Nights in the Forest

The first image of Satyajit Ray’s film is a tracking shot of the landscape. The camera is inside a car and someone reads a passage from a nineteenth-century book by Sanjib Chandra Chattopadhyay on the charms of the forest of Palamau. Little by little, we realise that this is a journey of liberation: four friends from Calcutta’s well-to-do bourgeoisie — bachelors, and very different from one another — want to return to the laws of nature for a few days, to forget their own problems and the suffocating rules of the city. Despite the car and the road, Days and Nights in the Forest (Aranyer Din Ratri, 1969) is a false road movie; no sooner do they arrive in Kechki than they try to stay, even without authorisation, at a government rest house. To impress the caretaker, Shekhar introduces his friends as VIPs, omitting, however, that he himself is nothing more than an unemployed man. They end up bribing the poor man, who fears being sacked. “Thank God for corruption,” says Ashim, from the height of his haughtiness. Although they intend not to shave, as if they were hippies, it is immediately clear that they have not left their class privileges at home, and they behave with the tics of colonisers.

They settle in quickly and, after a brief wander among the trees with Tarzan-style cries, let the alcohol take over. The camera films them drunk as if they were in the dock (a type of shot that will be repeated, with even greater intensity, in the memory game). Ashim and Sanjoy are aware that the rules of adult life have wedged them into boring jobs and empty relationships, and that the joy of their university days is lost forever. The higher you climb, the greater the fall. What they did not expect is that the forest, instead of soothing them, would begin to lay bare their flaws. So that no doubts remain, Satyajit Ray shows them over the course of the film in three powerful flashbacks: the arrogance of Ashim, the cowardice of Sanjoy, and the self-centred, aggressive rage of Hari. Only Shekhar escapes this settling of scores, because his character (played by the comic actor Rabi Ghosh) is a kind of jester, whose sole ambition is to tell jokes and say a few words in English in a naïve simulacrum of cosmopolitanism. In practice, he exists to create friction, as a counterpoint to the others, who will one day be a perfect example of the good, conventional, docile Bengali middle-class man.

In the morning, they meet Aparna and Jaya, and also the inspector who casts some instability over their stay at the rest house. The microcosm is closed and hierarchically organised: the local villagers, the watchman, Lakha, Duli (the uninhibited Santhal girl) — treated with disdain and even violence — are in the lowest segment; on the same level, but inaccessible, the two mysterious, sophisticated young women whom they try to impress with enormous ineptitude.

There follows a series of incidents that will reveal their true character behind the pretentious pose: the routine of nightly drinking bouts, where they vent their frustrations; the affair of the lost wallet, which leads Hari unjustly to accuse Lakha — the man who runs their errands — and to assault him (later, he will take his revenge); the arrogant confrontation with the manager of the rest house, from which they come out well only thanks to Aparna’s serene intervention; or the picnic on the grass that begins with biscuits, like a scene from Renoir, but degenerates into a psychological clash. As they say the names of famous figures, such as Karl Marx, Cleopatra or Shakespeare, the camera catches them in quick, revealing close-ups. The memory game ceases to be an amusement and turns into a question of power. In the end, Aparna condescends once more and lets Ashim win.

The strongest moment of the film, however, is the visit to the fair (Renoir again!), when the romantic tensions and illusions of superiority of the four friends from Calcutta finally collapse. The group splits up and Satyajit Ray underlines this drifting apart with parallel editing full of rhythm. The quick cuts, joined by shots of the Santhal community, expose the moral contrasts of the four: Shekhar follows his lesser path, cadges some money off Ashim, gambles and loses. At the same time, the film juxtaposes the bourgeois, intellectual restraint of Ashim’s dialogues with Aparna, or Sanjoy’s with Jaya, with the rawness of Hari’s carnal approach to Duli in the forest. The connections between the pairs are evident; yet, faced with the strength and intelligence of the women, the men prove too flawed in character. There is a brief shot in which deer can be seen, but nothing is resolved. Instead of feeling sorry for themselves, the four friends needed, as Aparna tells Ashim, to lose some of their arrogance.

The next day, they all return to Calcutta. Yes, as Chattopadhyay said, there is immense melancholy in the forest.