Word Trap

Beware words! Paragraphs just about do the business. Sentences can give a dodgy clarity; while phrases to lead us astray. Never trust one word or three, they are sure to sink us. Like this tiny canoe trying to shortcut the rapids. Crunch! against two small rocks, the canoeist calls ‘contemplative’ and ‘timelessness’. The sort of verbals often used when describing the East. If only they’d taken the long, sinuous course of a chapter, they might have made it to journey’s end, reached the true meaning of Days and Nights in the Forest, which is closer to New York and London than Calcutta and Mumbai. Hey man! you can’t just perch Satyajit Ray onto a boulder. My god, the man’s a genius! He steps across all the river's rocks.

Tom Milne’s review, which is very good, includes such insights as Ray’s use of Victoriana to create an atmosphere where time is unfastened from objects, allowing the ancient, old and modern to coexist on the same temporal plane. But then come the idées fixes - ‘time’ and ‘contemplative’ - which Milne thinks define the director’s oeuvre. Damn! My eyes hooked on his idées fixes they become my own, as I ponder their inadequacies. Stale vegetables in my basket…. The generalisations too loose, they miss the complexity of a Satyajit Ray movie, where the overall shape, tending towards the harmonious, absorbs the tensions between its individual parts, where the drama can be traumatic. What Milne calls timelessness is in fact what Ravi Shankar calls the ‘sweet melancholy’ at the heart of a performance; that stillness when the music transfigures the soul. In Ray, as in Shankar, we touch the depths when the complicated and the dramatic are resolved into a quiet simplicity. Milne, paying too much attention to the overall design, has glossed over the intricate diversity of those details.

Parenthetically, but still pursuing the theme of time, it is interesting that the most frequent criticism levelled against Ray by his detractors is that his films are too slow, and by his admirers, that he cannot handle melodrama… Opposite ends of the same candle, these criticisms arise because Ray’s cinema is essentially one of contemplation in which both he and his characters like to ponder first, act afterwards. A good illustration is the scene in Days and Nights in the Forest where the four young men wake up after a heavy night of drinking to find they have overslept a formal invitation to breakfast. Dismally aware of the breach of etiquette, but unaware that their hosts know all about the reason for it, the hangdog quartet trail off to make their apologies. But time has not frozen on the social gaffe in their hosts’ home as it has for them: the old man is singing his devotions, his daughter is busy with a book, his little grandson with a game. And as they – and the film – wait for the song to end, unwilling to be so graceless as to interrupt, the moment is miraculously bridged so that an apology is no longer necessary and the crisis is reduced to its proper proportions as a joke.  (BFI Notes)

Allowing for some curious phrasing - ‘frozen’, ‘unwilling’, ‘crisis’ - this is an accurate description of a scene which contrasts the civilised middle class with a cultured family whose intelligence and grace ignores conventions that constrain or coarsen relationships. The tension so beautifully resolved one hardly notices. It is the art and subtle wisdom of social virtuosos, who quietly and almost invisibly put their inferiors at ease. This family has the ability to read an atmosphere without articulating it; not like the bourgeoisie who must think through ideas making everything explicit.

The drama revolves around caste and class. The relation between the castes is changing, as modernity transforms the old social-religious distinctions into those of capitalism; at a time when the customary ideas remain largely intact; thus these young men’s embarrassment. What they don’t realise is how much has already changed. Behaviours more fluid than those old ideas suggest. For behind the traditional façade a whole new way of acting in the world has emerged. We have to be sensitive to our surroundings to navigate these strange waters. No longer to rely on habit, we must be alive to the moment, improvise not follow routine. Easy for Hari who has no fixed ideas. Impossible for Sanjoy, who suffers the mental rigor mortis of the middle classes.

To think before they act. Does this really describe Hari? While for Asim…my god the contortions I go through to twist this man into Milne’s verbal formula. In his marvellously intricate relations with Aparna, Asim’s thinking is acting; their friendship that of artists, whose thoughts are also feelings. It is a relationship where ideas transmute immediately into actions, themselves embodied ideas, symbols.

At holiday’s start, all four friends have the same idea about this place: a chance for exotic enchantment. Each returns to Calcutta with a different experience; while Asim is a changed man. We witnesses to the fluidity of Indian society; a culture, so intimate with feeling and sensuality, that it effortlessly transforms attitudes and ideas that are themselves inseparable from the emotions. Nothing, except Sanjoy’s rigid middle class morality, to stay the same. For Hari lost love is replaced by found love; his depression lifts when loving a local girl. And when she ditches him - after he grabs her hair pulling off a wig - this loss is transformed into male banter and subsumed into the story of their stay. The group flexible enough to domesticate any disturbance without a disrupting angst. This, I suggest, the inspiration for Milne’s ‘contemplative’; a word that describes a kind of mind absent from each of these individuals.

It also misreads a film showing the effects of this forest on different characters. Three of the men have troubles. Hari’s is a brief hiatus, remedied by a night with a woman. Asim’s and Sanjoy’s unhappiness is profound. While Sekhar…well Sekhar is the odd friend out: for him this holiday is just a break. Milne tellingly writes this man off: ‘essentially a hanger-on [with] no subplot of his own’. Yet Sekhar is part of an ensemble, the film’s chamber music discordant without his phlegmatic contrast. Milne’s canoe collides with one extremely large rock.

Never make a work of art too tidy. 

After the cello and viola, we have the violins…. Asim, the most acute of our four, is changed through meeting the clever and enigmatic Aparna. Sanjoy wrecks his escape fantasies by resisting Jaya (oddly Milne calls this an ‘affirmation’), who pays the cost in sobs. Oh Jaya…after Hari she is the freest person in the film, but is wracked by the convention making a widow sexually taboo. Oh Sanjoy! If only you were smarter, looser, more plastic. Too weak to see beyond the idea.

These men want freedom. Silly billies! Freedom is dangerous, both Sanjoy and Jaya to pay its high emotional prices. Sekhar is lucky, too emotionally constipated to let himself go, the only thing he hurts is his pocket. While Hari’s little liberties cannot do much harm; his pleasures too superficial to produce mindwreck. Asim and Aparna. They are involved in a complicated intellectual and emotional dance, as they balance their mutual affection with their own complexities, which demand independence and freedom, a distance between the self and society. They are still dancing around each other at film’s finale.

Under the lake’s silent surface the fish skirmish in its deeps. There is drama here, the intensity varying according to personality and relationship. One looks with a microscope to find it in Sekhar. In go the earplugs when Jaya’s cries. Jaya. Her feelings defeated by the habits of a petite bourgeois mind.

To think before they act. I wander around this idea like a prison guard his pantechnicon. Aparna is the only contemplative character here; although all have moments of withdrawal and reflection. Hari is reflex. Sekhar is action. Sanjoy is trapped inside simple ideas - it is the influence of the West. While in Asim, the closest of these males to the uber-sophisticated Aparna, action conflicts with thought, party-going with his inward sensibility. It is this conflict that opens him up to Aparna’s influence. Unlike luckless Sanjoy, who remains closed to Jaya’s. Jaya. She feels before she thinks. A wonderful woman cruelly treated.

Milne’s mistake? A highly cultivated milieu, which intertwines feeling and thought shaping character, is being confused with the texture of a film that is in fact exploring the tensions within this milieu, its culture under pressure from modern mores. In missing this pressure, too much emphasis is put on the ruminative, a close cousin to that occidental cliché, ‘the wisdom of the East’; which may explain Milne’s emphasis on the movie’s ‘timelessness’ - we go to India for ancient spirituality. Yet Days and Nights in the Forest is all about change. An idea of India occludes the work’s substance.

Ray’s concern is modern Bengal. Asim and Sanjoy are not fulfilled by a materialism that puts excessive stress on the public persona, emptying out the inner man. Asim feels this emptiness; Sanjoy is oppressed by the conformism. The holiday is supposed to be a break from these tensions. It is not to be. The tensions will have their way. Asim, through Aparna’s help, comes to trust the private self; Sanjoy is helpless before his public image. To return to Milne’s breakfast scene. Aparna and Jaya inhabit a different mentalité; the reason neither attach importance to the form of that formal invitation. Their enjoyment of the night’s drunken dance – a picaresque event - offsets the morning lateness which they regard as trivial. For private enjoyment trumps public form; friendship is tolerant of tomfooleries; with friends you are allowed to be silly; in the privacy of one’s affections all things are accepted, as the understanding slides below the surface behaviour. A lesson for these young men. Cocooned inside ideas that put appearance before feeling, they must learn to discard those Calcutta concepts, which freeze thought and action. The joke is on them for taking their late arrival too seriously. Stiff chaps not free flowing spirits.

It is to discover a new world. But not the one they came to find, that primitivism of the forest. Aparna’s family are sophisticates, whose grace in living - it is the beauty of the arts - distances them from the usual caste conventions. Super-civilised Aparna is of a quality immeasurably higher than these somewhat predictable blokes; the secret of her freedom and independence. While Jaya, at once part and to the side of this culture, acts through her feelings; these fresher and stronger that Sanjoy’s stale notions.

In Aparna there is a kind of detachment, a mixture of deep feeling and deep thought – Milne’s ‘contemplative’ – that we associate with artists, thinkers and mystics. A select few. These traits shared only by Asim and Sanjoy, when at film’s end they are forced to reflect on their experiences. That’s right, forced! Asim opening up to a new kind of life; Sanjoy despondently returning to the old. The tensions are palpable and powerful, but are reduced to the deceptively innocuous when resolved within the overall harmony of the ensemble. Sensitive people are affected deeply by the lightest of touches…behind these quiet facades there are cataracts of feeling and thought. Amongst the best, drama is melodrama, poetry of the most excruciating taste.