Ray-manic

Let’s play a game, try to identify the films mentioned below from the descriptions associated with each -

Film 1 (2009) advertised that this was the first film after Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri where Aparna Sen and Sharmila Tagore acted together. It further went that even the Ray masterpiece didn’t have the two pitted against each other in the same frame as this film did.

Film 2 (2003) took three of the four characters of Aranyer Din Ratri to the forest of Dooars on a sequel train at a time when the DVD, CD version of the Ray original was not readily available all over the place.

Film 3 (2013) flaunts that all the characters of the film are having names same as the different major Ray characters in the master’s film oeuvre.

Film 4 (2012) uses Ray’s Charulata in the title and tries to depict a ‘contemporary’ Charu in showing her as a sex-starved siren.

Film 5 (2012) has the same director of Film 4 using the name (but in a different font) which Ray used for a triplet he directed as a tribute to Rabindranath Tagore on the latter’s 100^th Birth Anniversary in 1961.

Film 6 (2010) by Bengal’s most celebrated director after the towering Ray actually depicts an alleged love-story between Ray and his actress muse – fictionalized but the references are hard to miss.

Film 7 (2010) by a debutant director draws frame-wise parallel between Ray’s Uttam Kumar starrer Nayak and a film-within remake of it.

Film 8 (2008) by an actor-turned singer-turned director again used Aranyer Din Ratri’s four characters to a trip to the mountains as the members of a travel agency with repeated reference to the Ray’s masterpiece in the form of game playing or conscience bursting!

Film 9 (2013) took Satyajit Ray’s Kapurush o Mahapurush and slyly just interchanged the order in the title.

Apart from these there are innumerable Feluda movies during this last 10 years as well to make the idle mind reminisce a popular Ray creation, try to savour, retort to comparisons, get disappointed and wait for the next one!

As the statistics show, using Ray’s work as blatantly as making the comparisons physically and visibly correlating is what many of the Bengali directors have decided to practice. There may be an element of disrespect towards the audience’s intellect, may be an ignorance, or it can be a ploy to make the films easily communicable to the audience they wish to cater. In the effort, a sizeable younger generation (apart from the film school students) has steadily and surely moved away from these films and unfortunately from some differently refreshing contemporary Bangla films as well.

This question of using film references of Ray (or any other film) is a tricky question as well – cause the tenets of inter-textuality somewhat lose relevance here. Tagore for example is used and re-used much more than Ray – as background songs, in recitals, as the narrative of films and so on. Yet in those cases we try to gauge how well the original has been ‘transcreated’ in the ‘different’ medium of cinema. That is how we have argued that Charulata is indeed an artistic rendition of Tagore’s inciting Nashta-Neer. However if the medium is same we are less lenient, in fiction we raise the issues of plagiarism, in cinema we use soft focus in a sepia feeling of ‘nostalgia’.

It is no wonder hence that Koushik Ganguly’s Apur Panchali (2014) with such a title will dwell on the flashback anthem to cater to a nostalgia-starved population. The film’s packaging is ideal for such a treat. It starts off with gaiety – a search for Subir Banerjee, the actor in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali who played the child Apu. Apu as a character is important in Indian cinema – the different stages of him in the 3 films which Ray had made, together termed as The Apu trilogy. Koushik’s film drew heavily from The Apu trilogy, using footage at will and at random, making the common sensitive audience go gaga over it. It is time to ponder whether their marked ebullience is due to the new film or in reminiscing and recollecting Ray’s masterpieces. The story line of the new film works on three planes actually – at one level we find an aged Subir representing the contemporary times who is in communication with a Film institute student regarding an award bestowed upon him from Germany for his role of Apu. The other level in black and white deals with Subir’s recollections of his life in the form of a disjointed sequence of flashbacks. The sequences are craftily picked up in a way so that the Ray films’ footages can be used. The third level is actually the Ray footages which ornaments the film but in a sense becomes more important than the film in question.

As mentioned earlier, in order to commemorate Ray’s trilogy, the sequences of Subir’s life in the flashbacks are handpicked. In a later sequence Subir tells how Apu’s shadow never left him and how his life seemed uncannily similar with Apu. It may come across as interesting for many to find out the whereabouts of several child artists who went into oblivion post the film which made them famous. However, in trying to draw analogy with Apu’s life and justifying it with Ray clips seems an overboard attempt. Looking at it closely, the most important highlights of Subir’s life seem to be:

1. his father’s death
2. death of his son during child birth
3. suicide of his wife

It is only normal that a person’s parents will pass away before the person himself. So father’s death is not anything striking and unique of Subir and Apu. Apu’s son Kajal was alive unlike Subir, while Subir never had a sister like Durga (for Apu) who passed away when Apu was a child. The only resemblance so it seems is between Aparna’s death during childbirth for Apu and Asheema’s suicide for Subir. The director however was liberal in his use of motifs (which cannot be termed as similarities between the lives of the two characters in any stretch of imagination) where the Ray clips are used. It soon became a lovable game for the audience to relate the flashback situations of Apur Panchali to the Trilogy sequences which followed them:

1. Subir putting his ear against the electric post followed by the famous Pather Panchali shot when Apu came to see a train for the first time in his life,
2. Subir’s facial expression after his son’s death news reminiscing Apu’s in Apur Sansar after Aparna’s death
3. Subir throwing the sacred thread in the pond followed by the scene from a similar one in Pather Panchali where Apu threw the string of beads stolen by his sister Durga,
4. Subir’s father’s death sequence merging with Harihar’s in Aparajito (including the inimitable flight of the pigeons on the ghats of the Ganges)
5. Married Subir’s conjugal moments interspersed with Apu’s in Apur Sansar

Apur Panchali ends with imagery of the river and the boat which came back multiple times in Apur Sansar. Whereas in the latter the ending had the flowing river in parallel to Apu’s flight indicating a flow in his life which was missing probably, Subir’s course of walk is also in parallel but away from the camera. Thankfully, in this case atleast Apur Sansar’s footage was not used as a comparing shot.

Jean-Luc Godard once famously said “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” Apur Panchali, like many other films listed in the beginning of this article have tried in varying capacities, spans the fabric of nostalgia deliberately using Satyajit Ray’s cinema in the most direct way. Few of them, individually may appear as an entertaining view like Apur Panchali and hence deserving some praise however what really is of concern is where does these references and correlations leading the Bengali cinema to. To this critic they don’t lead us to anywhere worthy of mention. Quite simply, a day will come when the Ray references will be exhausted, and then there will be repetitive references till the audience gets tired of the ‘subtle’, ‘nuanced’, ‘poetic’ merging of footages from Ray classics into a vacuous narrative of the recent films. The Bengali director needs to ride the tide to remain honest with his/her audience. For this alone, in spite of a few repetitive misgivings Koushik’s Shabdo will remain as a major film of his ahead of Apur Panchali.