People who go on vacation exist in a parenthetical pocket of suspended time, in some other place from their natural environment, before going back to what we laughingly call our real lives. Except in unusual cases, what we do on vacation doesn’t seem to matter or count, even if we’ll recall it more vividly than the blur of allegedly productive weeks. Exactly because “nothing is happening”, this breather can bring us into contact with what we really think or how we really are. Such is the premise of the holiday movie, a multi-limbed genre that may escalate into horror or comedy or, in its more thoughtful incarnations, cast adrift into the quiet study of human nature provided by Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest (Araṇyer Din Ratri), a 1970 film newly restored by The Film Foundation and released on Blu-ray, DVD and UHD by Criterion.
The opening of Days and Nights in the Forest is a traveling shot of the passing countryside as we hear a voice reciting something about it. Are we on a train? No. However, since this is a Satyajit Ray film, he won’t forget to toss in a shot of a train passing out of sight; we’re just not there yet. For now, we’re in a car with four young friends on vacation from their boring jobs in Kolkata or Calcutta. They’re jammed into entirely too close quarters, but they’re used to it.
The one reading aloud is Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), a bookish bespectacled fellow reading a 19th-century guide to the wooded tribal region of Palamu, with its promise of topless women “black as ebony”. The guys leer and smirk at each other over their love affairs or lack of them. Only the loud, short, clownish Shekhar (Rabi Gosh) proudly declares himself above such “bourgeois” topics while railing at everyone else about it.
Especially rail-worthy is the sleepy, moody Hari (Samit Bhanja), a professional cricketer who’s just broken up with his girlfriend. He gets a brief flashback to the breakup, in which the woman is played by Aparna Sen, a film star who will become a celebrated filmmaker herself. As she sits primping in front of a mirror and complains that she doesn’t connect with him, he accidentally pulls off her bounteous wig.
This abrupt halt to his violent reaction shows his shock, as though he didn’t know this about her. She slaps him on the jump cut back to the present, as though knocking him out of his reverie. Perhaps, as she claimed she’d been baring her soul to him, she didn’t want him to know about her hair, and her anger is mostly at being exposed. This emblematic scene concisely conveys their relationship and their city as a world of physical and intellectual pretense.
The car’s owner and driver is Ashim, the most dapper among them and more or less the romantic lead of Days and Nights in the Forest. He’s played by Soumitra Chatterjee, first introduced as the lead in The World of Apu (Apur Sansar, 1959) and therefore a major star for Satyajit Ray and Bengali cinema. He’s unrelated to Subhendu Chatterjee, although they often made films together. The last of Soumitra’s many films for Ray is Ganashatru (1990), a tense adaptation of Henrik Ibsens An Enemy of the People in which he gives a riveting performance as a doctor in a moral quandary.
Ashim and Sanjoy used to publish a literary magazine in their salad days. You must admit, says Sanjoy, we never published any bad writing. Those days are gone, and now they work in middle-class jobs that they certainly don’t waste breath discussing on vacation.
In their first act of privileged imposition, the four men decide to stay at a nice guest bungalow. It’s there for the purpose, but a sign warns they must have permission from a local official who grants reservations. The old caretaker, whose wife is ill, tells them this and expresses fears of losing his job, but the friends wheedle him and hand him some money. Shekhar says in English, “Thank God for corruption.” Ashim is later described by a certain woman as a successful man who doesn’t take bribes but bribes others.
Over the few days of the action in Days and Nights in the Forest, this question of official permission hangs over the men’s heads and sometimes becomes a problem as they are visited by increasingly higher levels of bureaucrats. The question’s sudden resolution in a puff of “connections” and gender relations shows “how things work” in India, especially for those of the right class, sex, ethnic status, etc. Thank God for corruption. It also shows that these urbanites are willing to presume and to subvert the structures they participate in, but they’re not quite willing to tear them down, as opposed to getting drunk every night.
That hint appears in the newspaper scene. Shekhar expresses their temporary freedom from the cares of the city by burning a newspaper, which seems a rather extreme gesture to viewers in 2026, and even to non-Indian viewers in 1970. To Indians in 1970, however, it’s a fraught symbol of what burning was actually going on. The headline says something about a Sino-Soviet border clash. Such events have a bearing on the armed Naxalbari (or Naxalite) Uprising of 1967, led by tribal communities and joined by students, that led to the formation of the Communist Party of India in 1969.
Devika Girish, co-editor of Film Comment, explains this in her essential liner notes with Criterion’s disc. This social and political context of what’s happening in Calcutta is so subtly placed as to be lost to non-contemporary or non-Indian viewers, and it adds a profound dimension to the seemingly minor vacation events of Days and Nights in the Forest. She also explains that Ray loosely adapted an autobiographical novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay, making it a darker portrait for the times.
Our four vacationers, older than students and far removed from tribal peoples, have dug themselves more or less safely into salaried positions, except the unemployed Shekhar, and they’re escaping and turning their backs on that level of opposition to the establishment. When Sanjoy is asked to name famous people in a memory game, he can’t help naming Karl Marx and Mao, indicating that his heart and mind are alienated from his body’s actions. He’ll show us a clearer example later.
The major events of this little vacation from urban cares will be three romances, although perhaps only one is really a romance. Ashim meets the stylish, intellectual Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), daughter of a patrician old man, Tripathi (Pahari Sanyal), who’s visiting his country house nearby. When Ashim invites himself into her little room apart from the main house, he does what many of us would like to but are usually too polite to do.
While she stands poised at the window, as though in a witness box, he leafs through the books on her shelf: Penguin paperbacks of new American plays, metaphysical poets, one of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries, and something by Alan Isaacs called The Survival of God in the Scientific Age. Her LPs are equally eclectic: traditional Indian music, Joan Baez, Andres Segovia, Mozart, the Beatles’ Rubber Soul (on which George Harrison first plays sitar) and the tasty-looking Indo-Jazz Suite by Indian musician John Mayer and Jamaican saxophonist Joe Harriott.
“I really can’t figure you out,” he declares to this woman he’s met ten minutes ago. “Is that necessary?” she asks, but she also knows she’s flirting.
Sanjoy is drawn to Jaya (Kaberi Bose), Aparna’s widowed sister-in-law, who has a small boy. Their interactions will be more subtle until, in an act of bravery on her part, she confronts him with what they both want. In contrast, and perhaps because he’s slumming on the rebound, the athletic Hari has no trouble taking what he wants (and paying for it) with Duli (Simi Garewal), one of those ebony-skinned tribals. She’s her own person, shaped by a background she mentions casually and by her need to serve those who can pay for whatever little job it may be.
Her counterpart, in a way, is a certain local who’s suddenly drafted as a servant by throwing him cash. He hangs around as an eager lackey for these rich city folk, although he’s kept on a tight leash and eventually subjected to accusations and violence by Hari. His friends will push Hari to apologize to the ladies for imagined slights concerning his wallet but not to this tribal peasant, who will burn with resentment.
As is usually the case with “nothing happens” films, Days and Nights in the Forest includes many incidents and sidelong revelations. It comes across as a Chekhovian study of its characters’ sadness and frustration, and it shows links to humanist influences such as Jean Renoir‘s A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne, 1946). Ray’s film deepens as you wander further into its bucolic details, where everything isn’t as serene and picturesque in the backwoods as it seems.
Aside from Satyajit Ray’s own lovely music, one of the defining aesthetic choices of Days and Nights in the Forest was announced by that opening shot from the window. Soumendu Roy’s black-and-white camera is more or less constantly on the move; not dramatically, but forever making its little pans and dollies as it locates its humans in relation to each other and their surroundings. One scene at a fair rises up weightlessly, dizzily, in one of those boxy Ferris wheels that seem a staple of so much Indian cinema.
A famous scene of people sitting on the ground playing a memory game becomes intense and lyrical as it sweeps and cuts around the players. This movement isn’t just visual interest; it’s also a statement that even quiet places, seemingly in stasis far removed from urban bustle, abound in activity and complexity, like our rarely inactive minds.
In a bonus introduction on the Criterion disc, filmmaker Wes Anderson explains that he’s been a part of The Film Foundation’s ten-year quest to restore Days and Nights in the Forest, fortunately from its preserved negative. Like so many Ray films, it’s become increasingly difficult to find a watchable copy, and now it’s on DVD, Blu-ray, and a Blu-ray/UHD combo. He rhapsodizes over it, revealing that he stole the “memory game” for a scene in Asteroid City (2023). Sharmila Tagore is also interviewed along with Film Heritage Foundation director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. A making-of has Tagore, Ghosh, Soumenda Roy, and archival interviews of Ray.
Many people, like Anderson, have called Days and Nights in the Forest one of their favorite Satyajit Ray films or one of their favorite films. This is my second viewing since college, and although I’m less enraptured by it, that’s not a fault of mine or the film’s. Those of us who see as many Ray films as we can, which isn’t always easy, have our luminous favorites that pierce our hearts for whatever reason.
For me, apart from the Apu Trilogy, it’s the miraculous transcendence of The Big City (Mahanagar, 1963) and Ray’s final great-souled apotheosis in The Stranger (Agantuk, 1991). For others, it may be Devi (1960) or The Home and the World (Ghare Baire, 1984). What matters is that Satyajit Ray’s cinema is a land we’ll always feel privileged to escape into for a few hours of insightful meditation, and perhaps, if we’re lucky, for whole days and nights.