Luminous Restoration of Satyajit Ray’s ‘Days and Nights in the Forest’ Radiates With Humor and Humanism

We have Wes Anderson to thank for the luminous restoration of “Days and Nights in the Forest,” Indian director Satyajit Ray’s classic “weekend with the boys” movie. Playing at Film Forum, the restored pic brings the director’s striking black-and-white imagery, perceptions of a post-colonial India, and sensitivity to male-female dynamics into clearer view via a new digital print, one that was first proposed by Mr. Anderson a few years ago as a board member of Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation. A fan of the film, not to mention Mr. Ray’s entire oeuvre, the American auteur even paid homage to one of its key scenes in his 2023 film “Asteroid City.”Funny and wise and filled with memorable scenes, the film — also one of the favorite movies of celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, the mother of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — was first screened in the U.S. at the 1970 New York Film Festival, where it garnered a standing ovation according to The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael. Mr. Ray had already had huge success in his homeland and abroad with some of his prior works, masterpieces like the three films in his Apu Trilogy (1955-1959) and 1963’s “The Big City.” Yet after a disappointing sojourn in Hollywood and two genre movies back in India — one a crime drama and the other a musical fantasy—the director returned to his more observant, character-based style of storytelling with “Days and Nights.” Like many a great getaway, it begins with a car ride. Four youngish friends are traveling from Calcutta to Palamu, an area in eastern India known for its forests, hills, and agrestic beauty. There’s dapper, de facto leader Ashim, bookish Sanjoy, muscular and dopey Hari, and, finally, Shekhar, the jester of the group. Cosmopolitan and generally educated, they hope to escape the daily grind of city life through a few days’ immersion in nature, though their pursuit of both calm and countryside doesn’t deter them from laughing at the “uncivilized” locals.As we find out more about them, their four stereotyped personalities turn out to be misleading. A cricket player, Hari is sleepy and sullen due to a recent breakup; Sanjoy unhappily works in a middle management position while pining for his boss’s daughter; Shekhar is jobless and penniless; and Ashim expresses ambivalence about his professional success and even existential melancholy. Furthermore, the condescension they show towards the rural people they meet is tempered by their clear camaraderie, how they genuinely seem to enjoy each other’s company and look out for one another despite the occasional squabble.A key early scene finds the four drinking a local liquor at a rustic outdoor tavern in the evening, with Mr. Ray moving the camera from one face to another as they wallow in self-pity and indifference. Soon, they meet a dark-skinned, “tribal” young woman named Duli, whom Hari will fall for and, later in the film, threaten to smack, in a reversal of what was done to him by his ex-girlfriend. Stumbling back to their parks department bungalow, which they secured via a bribe, they sing and shout through the forest. “People behave like kids when they leave the city behind,” utters Ashim in an earlier scene, and the quad certainly proves the point by behaving like spoiled boys/entitled city elites who choose the boorish, the customary, and the convenient over the peaceful and the unfamiliar.In an ironic twist, a bourgeois family also visiting the area puts them back on their best behavior, at least intermittently. Widower Sadashiv is there with his daughter Aparna and widowed daughter-in-law Jaya. Immediately and almost imperceptibly, Ashim decides to pursue Aparna, and Sanjoy chooses to get close to Jaya. From here, the film shifts to an intelligent, at times amusing exploration of the politics of courtship, social expectations, and fragile masculinity, though it never fully abandons its observations of inter-caste interactions and the urban-rural divide.One of India’s most iconic actors of all time, Soumitra Chatterjee embodies the character of Ashim with the perfect balance of confidence and insecurity. A late sequence with actress Sharmila Tagore (Aparna), another popular Indian star, proves a highlight due to the pair’s deftness in portraying flirtation and light reproach, though Mr. Ray’s direction also shines for continually recalibrating their position to each other amidst a dry, sandy riverbank. Concerned as it is with tentative emotions between a man and a woman, the segment evokes Antonioni at his most haunting.The other actors and actresses give accomplished performances, too, with Rabi Ghosh especially effective at keeping Shekhar from becoming a caricature. With Shekhar and the other characters speaking Bengali sprinkled with the occasional English word or phrase, the film offers a perceptive chronicle of a post-independence India, of its young adults finding their own identity between the conformities and pleasures of the past and the freedoms and uncertainties of the future.This is epitomized in its most indelible scene, the one Mr. Anderson borrowed from. The four friends play a memory game with Aparna and Jaya in which each consecutive player calls out the name of a famous figure after recalling the previous ones in sequential order. A few of the names mentioned include Shakespeare, Cleopatra, Marx, Bobby Kennedy, Mumtaz Mahal, who inspired the Taj Mahal, and Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengal region’s own Shakespeare. As “Days and Nights in the Forest” reflects, the concept of multiculturalism was only just beginning to develop, with cinema as one of its most persuasive mediums.

Luminous Restoration of Satyajit Ray’s ‘Days and Nights in the Forest’ Radiates With Humor and Humanism

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