New Restoration

“From the master, another masterpiece … A clash/​negotiation between castes and sexes: selfish men and their hopes and cruelties and spectacular lack of wisdom, [and] women who see through them.”

Wes Anderson

Absent from theatrical distribution for decades, Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest is one of his most wise and invigorating contemporary fables—a film about the roundelay of desire and disillusion, and the great gulf of experience gained from either side of the class divide. In the aftermath of a bitter breakup, Hari is treated by his three best friends to a pastoral vacation far away from the hustle of Calcutta. The educated foursome can’t help but view their exciting and responsibility-free environs from a tourist’s point of view, but their entanglements with women, growing bar tabs, and inexperience with rural life and its labours brings their emotional vulnerabilities into wincing daylight clarity. A sketch of Days and Nights might resemble Cassavetes’s Husbands, but Ray distributes tension differently; the film’s narrative is a succession of charmingly ruthless character-revealing games that involve role-playing, bookish flirting, and pattern recognition.

In Bengali with English subtitles

“A major film by one of the great film artists … On the surface, [Days and Nights in the Forest] is a lyrical romantic comedy; the subtext is perhaps the subtlest, most plangent study of the cultural tragedy of imperialism.”

Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

“Profound … Satyajit Ray did it all, right from the script to hand-drawn storyboards, casting, editing, music, as well as the design of the unusual credit titles—he even operated the camera himself for the famed memory game sequence, where every movement captures the complexity of the relationships and identity of the characters.”

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Il Cinema Ritrovato
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