<i>Days and Nights</i> Remembers the Human Condition

The poetic title Days and Nights in the Forest, the 1970 classic by Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, expresses his sensitive approach to the bewildering human condition. In the film’s narrative, he gives equal importance to seven Indian singles — four bachelor friends and three women, mostly middle-class Indians from Calcutta — who meet in the rustic countryside on a sojourn that reveals feelings hidden beneath social status.

Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee) and Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), who co-edit a literary magazine, are typically dissatisfied intellectuals, same as their buddies Hari (Samit Bhanja), a cricket star, and goofball hanger-on Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh). Away from city life (escaping Hari’s shattered romance and indulging Shekhar’s nervous anxiety), they lord their sophistication over the country folk, breaking rules at a rented bungalow, drinking, gambling and ogling the local women.

All this seems familiar bourgeois arrogance, except that the foursome are tourists in their own country. Ray regards his compatriots with sensitive familiarity. Free of the shame that plagues contemporary ethnic consciousness, Ray is one of cinema’s great humanists who can observe flaws and folly without judgment or condescension.

Ray’s genius comes through when his men encounter women; Indian identity is revealed for its complexity. Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), a brahmin’s daughter, and her widowed sister-in-law Jaya (Kaberi Bose) are contrasts in temperament — one elegant, brainy, and quiet, the other lovelorn and voluble; one wearing fashionable white slacks and sunglasses, the other wearing a sari. Ashim is smitten, and Sanjay is interested but cautious. As the finest director of actresses since Ingmar Bergman, Ray presents the women as enigmatic cultural figures: sexually and maternally arousing embodiments of what men seek as mates to fulfill their own psyches.

Soumitra Chatterjee and Tagore (who portrayed young marrieds in Ray’s The World of Apu a decade earlier) here extend ideal romance to include the complications of adults who’ve known suffering, longing, and struggle. (Ray contrasts this to Hari’s sexual escapade with Duli, played by Simi Garewal as a wild-eyed, working-class vixen, a subplot that addresses class violence and men’s self-destructive impulses.)

These flirtations illustrate different emotional needs times four, then Ray ups the ante by showing that personal relations reflect the social obstacles that result from imperialism. The classic roundelay structure that Days and Nights in the Forest shares with Renoir’s The Rules of the Game and Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (anticipating The Big Chill) grows into a profound consideration of national character. The city tourists pursue what it means to enjoy the benefits of class, to recognize their cultural privilege and be “a good Bengali man.”

The couples meet during badminton (a game left over from India’s days as a colony of the British Empire), and then Ashim and Aparna get to know each other at her retreat when he sorts through her book and record collection — a tome on the metaphysical poets; a Penguin New American Drama edition that includes Edward Albee and Arthur Miller; a record collection ranging from Joan Baez to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, Mozart, Andrés Segovia, and Indo-Jazz. These cross-cultural totems turn a “minority” movie into a masterpiece that addresses global self-consciousness.

It makes sense that the current re-release of Days and Nights at New York’s Film Forum has been held over. This is the genuine work of art that people had to trick themselves into seeing in Sinners and One Battle After Another. Ray’s subtlety surpasses those fiascoes of cultural condescension.

In Days and Nights, Ray’s exploration of social identity climaxes at an impromptu picnic where the men and women play a game memorizing famous names — Gandhi, Nehru, Rabindranath, Karl Marx, Bobby Kennedy, Napoleon, Don Bradman, Mumtaz Mahal. These educated Indians drop British phrases and are fond of cricket (Hari’s sport) as part of their cultural assimilation. This is the same complexity found in the writing of Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James (also a cricket enthusiast in his memoir Beyond the Boundary), minus the political rhetoric. Instead, Ray shrewdly conveys each character’s part of the human condition.

Throughout that memory game, Ray’s visual poetry shifts the camera from face to face as if finding each person’s abundance through their spoken moniker, yet glorying in the rich irony. This scene, which inspired Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, is only one in a series of epiphanies in Days and Nights in the Forest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Uf_t9FwV0