DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST Movie Review

Aranyer Din Ratri

Four thirty-something middle-class Bengali men take a road trip into the countryside where they promptly get lost, rhapsodize about the forgotten ideals of their youth, and decide that they will stop shaving and become “all hippies.” It may have sounded like a romantic notion in 1970, but the supremely wise Satyajit Ray was hip to the true bourgeois aspirations of these self-centered men; in the end, they reveal themselves to be “all yuppies.” Along the way, the four—quietly smug friends who appear to have remarkably different personalities, at least on the surface—discover considerably more about themselves than they wanted to. The gentle but stinging social and political satire of Days and Nights in the Forest—a film that was largely overlooked in America due to its initial, bungled distribution—might be described as Deliverance as directed by Jean Renoir. Perhaps the most insightful and relaxed of Ray's contemporary social comedies, it's a deeply compassionate, amusingly critical, refreshingly unforced glimpse at a hypocritical society about to devour itself as casually as a picnic lunch on a warm summer day.

NEXT STOP … The Middleman, Smiles of a Summer Night, Vanya on 42nd Street

1970 120m/C IN Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Shubhendu Chatterjee, Samit Bhanja; D: Satyajit Ray; W: Satyajit Ray; C: Soumendu Roy; M: Satyajit Ray. VHS FCT