The long-awaited Satyajit Ray Collection Vol 1 is finally out - Andrew Robinson gives us an overview.
The 1960s were Satyajit Ray’s most fertile decade as a film-maker. Following the Apu Trilogy, completed in 1959, which made his name, Ray went on to make a series of remarkably varied, classic films. The best known are Charulata (1964) and Days and Nights in the Forest (1969). Almost as fine, though totally different from Charulata and from each other, are Mahanagar (1963) and Nayak (1966).
Charulata was Ray’s personal favourite among his 30 or so feature films. One reason was the perfect pitch of the performances, led by the radiant Madhabi Mukherjee as Charu, the lonely wife of a wealthy dilettante in 19th-century Calcutta who falls in love with her charming brother-in-law. ‘Is Charu the archetypal Ray woman?’ someone once asked Ray. ‘Yes, she is,’ he replied without qualification. Another reason was the richly embroidered Victorian setting, captured in Ray’s exquisite period sets and velvety lighting. Yet another was Ray’s own music—probably the loveliest he composed—based partly on the songs of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel prize-winning author of the original story.
Mahanagar stars Mukherjee too, this time playing a Calcutta housewife from the struggling middle class, forced to take a job to support her unemployed husband and family. Initially reluctant and timid, she comes to enjoy her new freedom, despite the acute domestic tensions it provokes.Contemporary Calcutta—‘The Big City’ of the film’s title, grittily evoked—is as much a character as the actors.
Nayak was unique for Ray in showing the world of movies: the Bengali equivalent of Bollywood. To play a film star travelling by long-distance train to collect an award, Ray cast Bengal’s leading matinée idol, Uttam Kumar. Although the star’s hang-ups are predictable—money, drink, women and sell-out—the train journey is a brilliant way to contrast screen image with social reality. The movie nayak (which means ‘hero’) turns out to have feet of clay. Sharmila Tagore, launched by Ray in the Apu Trilogy into a Bollywood career in the 1960s, plays a sexy magazine journalist, unseduced by glamour but sympathetic to the star’s predicament.
Three classic films from the renowned Bengali filmmaker, Satyajit Ray: Mahanagar, Charulata and Nayak.
Mahanagar (The Big City) (1963), stars Madhabi Mukherjee as a housewife whose growing independence alarms her traditionalist family, and is an often humorous story of conflicting social values.
Charulata (The Lonely Wife) (1964) was adapted from a story by Rabindranath Tagore, and Ray considered it to be one of his finest achievements. Neglected by her ambitious journalist husband, the lonely Charulata befriends his cousin, a sensitive aspiring writer, and almost inevitably their feelings for each other begin to deepen.
Nayak (The Hero) (1966) is a beautifully observed character study from one of Ray's earliest original screenplays. En route to an award ceremony, a famous and egocentric Bengali movie star finds that he is compelled to re-evaluate his life after encountering a disapproving young journalist (Sharmila Tagore).
