By Nathaniel Bell.
One of the most elusive major works by a celebrated film artist has been restored in 4K….”
Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest (original Bengali title: Aranyer Din Ratri) was, until now, one of the most elusive major works by a celebrated film artist. Its title seems to conjure both Renoir’s A Day in the Country and Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night but also invites comparisons to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Though known and cherished by devotees of classic cinema, it has never been released on DVD or Blu-ray in this country, which makes the 4K restoration and re-release a major event – the first great restoration of 2026.
Originally released in 1970 – and in the U.S. in 1973 – this rich humanist comedy follows four friends from Calcutta as they take a holiday in the wild, forested regions of Palamou. The passage from civilization into the rural hinterland of eastern India is captured in the brilliant opening credits sequence in which the camera zooms from a moving vehicle into the dense thickets until they become a hypnotic abstraction; suddenly, the glittering title cards appear over the score, composed by Ray himself. (If you feel a tinge of excitement when the choral elements wash over the soundtrack, you may be a cinephile.)
What begins as a carefree adventure whose main activities include getting hammered on high-proof moonshine and trying to seduce a local tribal woman (a striking Simi Garewal) eventually morphs into a journey deep into the forests of the self. All but one emerge changed men. The deceptively simple premise is handled with the utmost confidence of a master filmmaker as he attempts to achieve the richness of a novel. (Indeed, it is based on Sunil Ganguly’s novel, which Ray optioned before it was published.)
The quartet of protagonists consists of Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), an affluent executive, Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), a shy scholar, Hari (Samit Bhanja), a womanizing cricket athlete, and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh), a sweetly clownish gambler. They are the kind of materially successful, Western-educated, modern Bengali men whose happy-go-lucky attitudes conceal a deep well of spiritual emptiness. Ray wastes no time in exposing their snobby callowness toward the impoverished townsfolk as they move into a bungalow without permission, but neither does he conceal their spiritual neediness. Ray, ever the liberal humanist, refuses to lose faith in the possibility of their redemption.
When they encounter two city women on holiday – Aparna (the great Sharmila Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law, Jaya (a wonderful Kaberi Bose) – their veneer of self-confidence is punctured, and in a series of undignified confrontations, they begin to regain their souls. If the premise sounds light in incident, that is entirely by design, allowing Ray to work his usual magic of cooking up a sumptuous feast with the most basic of ingredients. The film’s famous “memory game” scene – in which the characters sit in a circle and take turns naming famous people, each person having to repeat the entire list before adding a new name – is a masterclass in psychology, beginning playfully and evolving into a revealing battle of wills. Eventually, each man faces his own moment of truth, and in temporarily losing his dignity, recovers his humanity.
Thanks to a network of dedicated cinema workers, Ray’s masterpiece has been carefully restored and presented by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project in collaboration with Film Heritage Foundation and released by Janus Films on its way to a permanent home in the Criterion Collection. Wes Anderson – who pays homage to the memory game sequence in Asteroid City – gets credit for getting the ball rolling before the pandemic hit. Cinematographer Soumendu Roy’s high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, to which third-generation bootleg copies have not been kind, can now be enjoyed as an aesthetic achievement, and Days and Nights in the Forest, which played at Cannes last May and opens at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles, can now reassume its secure position among the masterpieces of world cinema.
Nathaniel Bell is a Los Angeles based writer and educator whose work has appeared in LA Weekly, The Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches film history at Biola University.
The post Satyajit Ray’s Rich Humanist Comedy Restored: <i>Days and Nights in the Forest</i> (1970) appeared first on FilmInt.nu.
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