In the heyday of New Wave art films, you used to read a lot about Satyajit Ray, the lone postwar master who brought a delicate neo-realist brand of Bengali cinema to the world’s film festivals. In 1960, with only five years of filmmaking behind Ray, Sight & Sound’s Penelope Houston was already famously asking critics, “Ray or Ray?” That is, lyrical international art film or pop Hollywood auteurism as embodied by Nicholas Ray? But since his last film, finished just before his death in 1992, Ray’s work has fallen out of fashion barring the revered Apu Trilogy. And so, his films are ripe for reevaluation. The reappearance and restoration of Days and Nights in the Forest (1970) may be the kicker.
Unavailable for decades, and therefore known (if at all) mostly by way of Pauline Kael’s bonkers-swoony review in The New Yorker, Days and Nights in the Forest is a Renoirian idyll, following four Calcutta yuppie friends as they head into the country for a self-indulgent bro weekend. The country is hardly idealized, being mostly scrubland peopled by poor lower-caste locals that the trash-talking quartet largely condescend to as servants. As drinking unveils bitterness and insecurities, unlikely romances emerge with local women, each arc limned by Ray with patient skepticism. (An extended sequence centered on a memory game—nothing but lounging on the grass and flirting and watching others struggle to remember a growing string of famous names—is oddly but undeniably compelling.)
With English dropped in, only sometimes ironically, signposting the protagonists’ conflicted identities as Bengali but somehow better than that, the movie’s critique of the new urbanized Ugly Indian is sharp but empathic. With each cocky social failure, the men primarily delude and degrade and torture themselves. At times, with the occasional twinge of class-war danger amid the oblivious bravado, you think of another movie from the same era about four out-of-their-element city boys in the woods (1972's Deliverance) but Ray, always a devout humanist, instead opts for choked moments of disappointment and shame. Shot in simple 35mm black-and-white, the movie may not quite have us, as Kael saw it, “recognize the presence of the mythic in the ordinary,” but it’s a wise, gentle and unpretentious film, of a kind rarely crafted by global auteurs these days.
Days and Nights in the Forest runs February 27-March 12 at Film Forum.
