My latest movie column for Yahoo! India is about Satyajit Ray's most playful and timeless film, and the minor disconnect I once felt from it as a non-Bengali-speaking viewer. Here goes.
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Update - here's the full column:
I'm watching Satyajit Ray's fantasy-adventure classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, about two simpletons - the singer Goopy and the drummer Bagha - who use their music and their generally upbeat outlook towards life to help save the land of Shundi from an attack by a rival kingdom. I've seen the film twice before, and each time the subtitling has been inadequate (to say the least). Besides, on the first occasion years ago, I wasn't familiar with the original story written by Ray's grandfather Upendrakishore, and so I had to draw my own conclusions about some of the plot details.
Thus, when Goopy and Bagha used a boon given to them by the king of ghosts and accidentally reached a land called Jhundi, I figured this couldn't be a real place in Bengal because the landscape was snowy. A while later, the subtitles vanished altogether for a 10-minute stretch, leaving me clueless about what the Raja of Shundi was saying to our two heroes. Since I had guessed by this point that Shundi too was an imaginary land, I briefly wondered if the Raja was speaking an invented language that the viewer wasn't supposed to understand. (Not a very improbable idea given the Ray family's flair for fantasy, including the nonsense verse composed by his father Sukumar.)
On the DVD I have now, there is an attempt of sorts to capture the rhythmic playfulness of the film's dialogue and songs. For instance, in a scene where Goopy sings a song to thwart (and "freeze") the cunning minister of Halla, the subtitle for the opening lines read:
"Oh Mr Minister with Plots so Sinister...
Stop!
Don't you try concealing
Your crafty double-dealing!"
But even the most imaginative subtitles can't replace the experience of understanding the words as they are spoken, and therein hangs a tale of disconnect. I love Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, but I'm aware that it can never be part of my childhood mythology in the way that Hindi movies were - or the scone-and-macaroon-filled world of Enid Blyton for that matter.
The first time I saw Ray's film, the language was a barrier. Take the enchanting scene where the king of ghosts, speaking in a singsong voice, offers Goopy and Bagha three boons. The impact of the scene - the sense of mystery and wonder it creates - hinges on the cadences of the ghost's speech as well as Ray's use of a syncopated electronic tune; it requires an immediate link between the viewer and the characters. And so, there's a big difference between the experience of the Bong viewer - who understands the words and their inflections directly - and the experience of the gatecrasher whose eyes must flit back and forth, from the subtitles (which in any case are often so poor that a second layer of conscious interpretation is required) to the expression on the ghost's face (it's delightful how he looks wide-eyedly from Goopy to Bagha and back again as he speaks, as if they, not him, are the oddities).
Similarly, when Goopy and Bagha sing about the various types of ghosts they saw in the forest ("Tall ghosts, squat ghosts! / Fat ghosts, lean ghosts! / Ripe ghosts, mean ghosts!"), it wasn't much fun having to read the rapid-fire flow of English words at the bottom of the screen instead of simply enjoying the song and dance, and the expressions on their faces. (Watching the scene on DVD now, with the subtitles turned off, is much more satisfying.)
As a result, my perspective on this film is necessarily different from that of the Bengali viewer who grew up with it (and perhaps with the original story as well). The reference points and associations are different too. Watching Ray's occasional use of wipes to separate one scene from the next, I wonder if he was influenced by Kurosawa's use of this technique in films like The Hidden Fortress and The Seven Samurai. The repeated call for an executioner to "chop off their heads" is reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. When the king of Halla breaks into song in the presence of a group of distinguished ambassadors who are visiting his court, I think of Groucho Marx's loony "Just wait till I get through with it" act in Duck Soup. (This isn't a stretch: Ray once wrote that if he had to take a single film with him to a desert island, he would choose a Marx Brothers film without a moment's hesitation.)
****
But it would be a mistake to suggest that the Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne experience can be spoiled by not knowing the language - it contains so many fine examples of pure visual storytelling. Watching it now, I marvel at how playful and experimental Ray was here (possibly one reason why this film and his other movies for children are neglected by Western critics: their existence is inconvenient for those who pigeonhole him as a director rooted in realism). He very effectively uses tracking shots and close-ups (as in the gloating faces of the village elders who get Goopy into trouble early in the story). There are freeze frames, there is even a series of jump cuts (when Goopy claps his hands while singing "Maharaja Tomare Selaam" for the king of Shundi), and many striking compositions that create a sense of unease: a scarecrow in the foreground as Goopy makes his way across a field; a shot of water dripping onto a drum followed by a slow pan to Bagha sleeping nearby. Best of all is the film's most famous sequence: the inventive and multidimensional ghost dance, which is a superb example of an aspect of Ray's creativity that many people are still sadly unfamiliar with.
The dance begins with four groups of ghosts (representing different classes of society - noblemen, soldiers and so on) posturing grandly, but it ends in all-round massacre, with everyone dead, and this foreshadows a key theme of the film. I doubt that anyone watching Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne even at the level of "mere entertainment" can fail to be moved by its understated yet clear-sighted pacifism, which finds its final expression in the uplifting climactic scene where hungry soldiers lay down their weapons and make a beeline for the pots of sweets that Goopy and Bagha have conjured for them. Ray doesn't underline the anti-war theme, but it's there for anyone to see.
Warmth and empathy are qualities found in all of Ray's movies, but this genre allows him to display them in their rawest, least guarded form: where else could you have that lovely visual of Goopy and Bagha performing for the Shundi Raja (played by the wonderful character actor Santosh Dutta, whose smiling presence is one of the most reassuring things about any movie I've seen him in), all three men so caught up in the moment that they beam unselfconsciously at each other, with the Raja swaying and clapping his hands like a little child in tune to the song? Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is about many things - it's about the strange and complex interactions between kings and commoners, about underdogs who triumph in the end, and about the value of good companionship (Goopy and Bagha must stay together if they want to continue availing of the ghost's boons). But most of all it's about two little heroes who want nothing much more than to "please people with our music" - though it doesn't hurt that in the best fairy-tale style they also end up winning the hands of beautiful princesses along the way! It's one of the most timeless films I've seen.
John W Hood’s Beyond the World of Apu: The Films of Satyajit Ray, published by Orient Longman, is a very low-profile book – I can find hardly anything on it online – but a very rewarding one. The essays here are elegantly and carefully written, and create a pleasantly reflective mood that somehow mirrors the experience of watching Ray’s cinema.
Ray was a multifaceted filmmaker and his oeuvre covered many themes, settings and styles, ranging from the stark but affectionate rural narrative of Pather Panchali to the cynical corporate-life urbanity of Seemabaddha, and from the wordy clash of ideologies in Ghare Baire to the imaginative visual flourishes of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Hirak Rajar Deshe. For the sake of convenience, Hood arranges the 29 films into nine broad chapters with such titles as “The Calcutta Triptych”, “The Urban Middle Class”, “The Tribute to Tagore” and “The Cry Against Tradition”. This arrangement isn’t always satisfying – it’s more cosmetic than organic, as Hood himself admits, and at least one of the classifications, the chapter “An Early Pastiche”, is arbitrary – but it serves the purpose well enough. Besides, any impression that Beyond the World of Apu might be a disjointed or incoherent work vanishes when you actually get down to the essays on the individual films – it’s here that Hood’s love for Ray’s cinema makes itself felt.
The format of these essays is misleadingly simple: at first glance, they appear to be lengthy plot synopses with a few comments thrown in here and there. But to read them more closely is to be impressed by Hood’s rigorous attention to detail in watching each film (this is comparable to Tim Dirks’ astonishingly detailed Greatest Films website), making notes on it, discussing sequences and characters at length and observing thematic connections or contrasts between different works.
This in-depth treatment also means that Hood can avoid emphatic black-and-white judgements. Though he stresses the importance of acknowledging that not every Ray film is a masterpiece (and categorically names the ones that he considers the director’s lesser works), he gives himself the space to discuss the strong points of the flawed films as well as the less satisfactory aspects of the masterpieces. He doesn’t gloss over any film, but at the same time his respect for Ray’s artistry never encumbers his critical faculties – he observes, for instance, that with the exception of Uttam Kumar’s performance in Nayak, Ray’s films are full of “hackneyed images of drunkenness” (and, on at least one occasion, a trite portrayal of mental illness and senility), and that some of the later works are verbose and pedantic. Though I disagreed with him on some specifics about the films, most of the arguments he uses to back up his opinions are difficult to quibble with. (One notable exception: discussing one of Ray’s late, lesser works Shakha Prashakha, Hood points to the excessive use of English words and phrases as a flaw because of “the sometimes heavy Indianness of their enunciation”. This didn’t make much sense to me; in real life, the sort of people depicted in the film do use a lot of English words and phrases, and speak them in heavy Indian accents.)
But in essence, this isn’t the sort of film writing that sets out to be instructive or didactic: Hood is first and foremost a movie-lover articulately engaging with the career of a filmmaker he greatly admires. And that’s an appropriate approach to this particular director, for the beauty of Ray’s best work lies in observation rather than judgement; in the interplay between characters and in little details and vignettes that add texture to a narrative. (Personally speaking, I have a hard time pointing to a single favourite scene – or even two or three favourite scenes – in a cherished Ray film: the overall experience is so much more satisfying than its composite parts.)
In his Introduction, Hood clearly states his objectives. “[This book] aims to be no more than a critical examination of 29 works of art, based simply on the texts themselves. It is not in any way biographical, nor does it make any claim to offer film history.” Beyond the World of Apu is a fine demonstration of these assertions. In its ordered structuring and clear setting out of goals, it resembles a lengthy specialised thesis in places, but it’s also an accessible work that avoids academic jargon or the sort of “critspeak” that might distance the casual (but engaged) viewer of Ray’s films. My own litmus test for the book’s effectiveness was that I was equally engrossed by the essays on the films I haven’t seen (or remember dimly) as on the ones I have seen. Hood’s book lacks the intensely personal touch of Robin Wood’s The Apu Trilogy (sadly out of print now), but as a comprehensive study of Ray’s career it belongs in the top tier. Despite its occasional formalness, this is a warm and inclusive work of movie analysis, a fitting tribute to the art of a man whose work is characterised by affection and empathy for the human spirit.
[Did a version of this review for the New Sunday Express]