Satyajit Ray | Jalsaghar / The Music Room | Mahapurush / The Holy Man | Joi Baba Felunath / The Elephant God
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Ray was vastly multi-talented. He was a painter, novelist and composer as well as being a prolific filmmaker.
The glass imagery in the film anticipates J.G. Ballard's novel The Crystal World (1964 - 1966). In Ballard's book, the crystallization represents the condensation of time into space: the crystals were a representation of time in visual and spatial terms. Similarly, in Ray's films the glass represents a visual expression of a temporal art, music. In both works, the glass represents something abstract made physical. The glass in Ray's film also strongly express the feelings of the characters in visual terms.
Roofs play a major role in both Jalsaghar and The World of Apu (1960).
The landscapes often have a line of water in them: a canal, a sea shore. Other lines, such as roads or rail road tracks often go through them. They tend to be very flat, very open and uncovered by vegetation or obstructions, and receding to a distant horizon.
There is often a sense of wistfulness about these landscapes: they represent a world which the characters wish to explore, but cannot. In Pather Panchali, the little girl is curious about the great world, but is too young and poor to explore it. In Jalsaghar, the aristocratic hero is too consumed by pride to leave his feudal estate.
There are other thematic similarities. Both films have heroes who rebuff their wives. These women attempt to influence their husbands to good, but who fail to rouse them out of their apathy.
Both are also among the few Ray films that feature upper class characters, aristocrats who live in palaces.
Jalsaghar also has structural similarities to The Chess Players. Both films have major musical numbers integrated into their plots, involving Indian classical dance and music. In The Chess Players, this involves a brilliant sequence starring a female dancer; the third and climactic concert in Jalsaghar also features a woman dancing.
The characters in both films have an obsessive interest in some field: music in Jalsaghar, chess in The Chess Players. Both of these are abstract subjects, worlds of pure idea that have no apparent relation with the world outside themselves. In both films, these subjects are the basis of social relationships: the two chess players are best friends. In Jalsaghar, music is the shared passion of the father and his little boy, in one of the most touching scenes of the film.
Feluda is played on screen by Ray favorite Soumitra Chatterji.
Ray wrote four volumes of detective stories about Feluda, known as the Bengali Sherlock Holmes. The final collection, Feluda's Last Case is full of pleasant characters, social depictions of daily life, and exotic descriptions of India: each one is set in a different Indian tourist destination, with lots of local color and travel writing. But they are often weak as detective story plots, and are slow moving (not a surprise for Ray, who was never a mad dasher). The best is "Trouble in Gangtok" (1970), which is set in Sikkim, where Ray made a documentary the next year.
Joi Baba Felunath is available on DVD. The subtitles are messed up on the DVD I saw, but once I got beyond this, the film is enjoyable.
I was glad I'd read some Feluda prose stories before seeing this, because the detective characters like Feluda seem much more clearly defined in the paper tales.
Ray starts soaring when he gets up on the roof of a house, and starts making panoramas, as he did in Jalsaghar. The interiors that follow also show his eye.
The tourist setting here is Benares, scene of Ray's wonderful Arapajito, and Ray gets in some nice location filming.