Rating: 4/5
Asian Cinema Challenge 2023 | 9/52 | Made in India
Arindam Mukherji combs his hair and packs his bag. He’s receiving a prestigious award, and he was initially planning not to attend the award ceremony, but he changed his mind. Not because he cares about the prize, mind you — he just wants to escape his problems for a day. Because he decided to go at the last minute, he couldn’t arrange for a plane. So, he will take an overnight train to Delhi. Arindam is a popular matinee idol in Bengal, whose name alone used to make movies successful. But times have changed. It also doesn’t help that the newspapers say he got in a brawl at a club. It seems that Aridam has given up on the public, studios, and people in general.
Once we arrive on the train, several passengers’ stories play out in tandem, all intersecting with Arindam in some way throughout. He encounters admirers, admonishers, and people with myriad agendas. Arindam’s desire to escape people may be in vain. Among them is Aditi Sengupta, who is an editor and one of three who work on a small magazine written by women. She approaches Arindam under the guise of getting an autograph, but cannot help but blurt her negative view of celebrity culture and the shallow movies they produce.
After talking with some passengers, Aditi reluctantly approaches him for an interview for her magazine. Their assumptions about one another create a difficult start, but through their reflections, they find themselves opening up to each other and learning just how little their assumptions truly capture.
…people like me shouldn't talk too much. We're creatures of light and shadow. It's best not to expose these bodies of flesh and blood too clearly to the public eye.
In some ways, this film is a shift away from the parallel cinema that Sanjit Ray had helped develop. While it still maintains Ray’s naturalism and artistic interests, it does not focus quite as heavily on the social issues of his Apu Trilogy and similar works. That’s not to say he doesn’t explore social issues, but rather that he does so through side characters and flashbacks. Though Ray had become an arthouse darling, he desired to make films that reached a wider audience.
Here, he focuses on a character of higher social status who appears to be only concerned with surface-level issues. However, the film is not content to stop there and drives us deeper, arriving at a complexity that one can only consider human. Though we have the magazine editor who interviews him, we still learn more from what isn’t said between them. These considerations are also Ray’s, as his screenplay explores the role of Indian cinema in the global film world—how much does he draw from American and Italian influences, and what aspects of his films convey Indian tradition and culture?
Although this was Uttam Kumar’s first collaboration with Sanjit Ray, Kumar had already appeared in over 100 movies, becoming an idol not dissimilar from his character in this movie. But the film is not a portrait, though it does consider on a meta-level the role of an actor in a movie—is Kumar a puppet for Ray’s screenplay, or is he bringing something greater? It’s hardly a question as Kumar’s performance is stunning in the many nuances of expression he brings to each line—nuances that no director can map out, not even the meticulous Ray.
Sharmila Tagore brings a similar degree of layering and complexity. Both are people who present themselves one way to the public, perhaps in the name of selfishness, but are aware of their inner selves and contain conflicting considerations within them. She also unveils the film’s most significant flaw—that is, Ray’s lack of consideration for women’s experiences in any public-facing occupation. I’m not saying the film is openly misogynist—just that, for a movie with so many depths, it feels slight when it comes to how women must move through the world.
Subrata Mitra’s cinematography is fluid and natural, shifting seamlessly from one composition to another in elegant flourishes. The transitions are gorgeous, almost surreal. Among the many ways that this film influenced Wes Anderson, one of the most notable is the way Mitra shifts through dialogue. These influences are most prominent in The Darjeeling Limited, train and all, though Mitra does not invest in flat images in the same way Anderson does.
The power of this movie is its lack of easy answers. For all the considerations mentioned, you won’t come away with any answers, only more questions to take with you into your future film experiences. While I find this easier to parse than Pather Panchali, I won’t pretend to understand much of its cultural considerations.