The Music Room

Satyajit Ray became internationally acclaimed with his first two features, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, which owed much to the traditions of documentary, poetic realism and the Italian Neo-realists. His fourth feature, The Music Room (1959), marks a significant and important step in his career. Following the critical and popular failure of the comedy The Philosopher's Stone, The Music Room showed the world that Ray had great range and talent beyond the naturalism of his first films. Ray takes a classical approach, informed by the masters on international cinema that he revered, for this drama set in the fading decadence of old-world feudal life of the 1920. Pather Panchali is a work of social observation with a director in sympathy with the plight of the characters. The Music Room offers a more complicated attitude toward its main character and to the changing world in which he lives. His portrait of the aristocracy, with its wealth and rituals and sense of social superiority and entitlement, increasing impotent and irrelevant in an India moving toward modernity, was his most accomplished film up that time and many critics still hold it as the director's masterpiece. Chhabi Biswas, a popular and respected actor of his day, plays Biswambhar Roy, once a powerful feudal lord, or zamindar, now a threadbare remnant of the old world. The opening scenes present him alone in his crumbling palace, sucking on his hookah like a pacifier, looking out over the ruins of his one mighty lands as the modern world passes him by. The sounds of a concert from a neighbor's estate sends him back to a time when his wife and son lived and he spent lavishly on recitals and celebrations. His great love is music and he considers himself a connoisseur and a patron of the arts, indulging in his hobby to the neglect of his fortune and his lands, which are slowly being swallowed up by the river. It's also a matter of social currency and vanity. To be a lover of music is not enough. Roy must be seen to be a true connoisseur with a public show of patronage and a subtle mastery of the art of presenting a master artist in his private music room. As presented by Ray and Biswas, Roy is vain and impotent, a remnant of a culture of refinement and respect more concerned with social stature and aesthetic pleasure than such grubby concerns as business or work, and his vanity and ego are ultimately the cause of his fall into isolation and irrelevance. Yet the film has is a grudging affection for Roy, who though foolish is a loving husband and father, and his loss is offered as both punishment for his narcissism and tragic comeuppance for a man too invested in his social superiority to learn from it. He's also a man invested in old-world signs and portents--a cricket drowning in a glass of wine, a spider crawling across his portrait--which director Ray uses for dramatic effect and metaphor. When the candles of Roy's chandelier slowly go out at the end of the long night, he watches in panic as if the stars are all flickering out. It is a beautiful metaphor, evocative and rich with multiple meanings: Roy sees it as a sign of his mortality and impending death while the director uses it as an illustration of the man's superstitions, a metaphor for the end of his influence and a signal that his time is at an end, as well as the simple measure of time: the night is over and the dawn is breaking. In contrast to the arrogant grace of Roy is the merchant Ganguly (Gangapada Basu), the son of a village moneylender who has become a successful businessman. This garish nouveau riche character, a music lover himself, gracelessly flaunts his fortune while courting the approval of Roy, still the symbolic elder of the social world. When Ganguly buys a local manor and launches his own concerts and celebrations, Roy takes it as a challenge to his status and to his very world. Next to the lone champion horse and an elephant grazing in the fields, all that's left of Roy's once mighty stable of status symbols, Ganguly has a motorcar and a generator bringing electricity his home (the chugging of the motor intrudes upon the serenity of Roy's evenings on his terrace). The clownish Ganguly is a powerful man with a crude manner that affronts Roy's sense of dignity. Ray clearly feels some sympathy for his threadbare aristocrat's sense of propriety even as he condemns the emptiness of his achievement. The music room becomes a battlefield for Roy's final display of social superiority, a perfectly staged show of old-world manners and rituals that come at such a cost as to make it meaningless. Though music played a central role in his first films, which were memorably scored by Ravi Shankar, The Music Room was Ray's first film to incorporate music and dance into the narrative of his films. In a way it is his response to the conventions of popular Indian cinema, which used song and dance numbers as interludes and spectacle. The three performances showcased here are recitals presented by Roy in his lavish music room, and are both part of the drama and apart from it, a preservation of the classical arts rather than a piece of pop entertainment, and a calculated show of Roy's rarified taste and refinement. Though we have seen him practicing the sitar and listening to music on his own, his smile and dreamy nods of appreciation appear to be more of a show for his audience than a spontaneous response to the music. In these performances, Roy's entrance and behavior is very much a part of the program. Criterion presents the DVD and Blu-ray debut The Music Room, mastered from the 1995 restoration. Before the restoration project was begun, there had been no effort to properly preserve Ray's early work and this restoration, based on a 35mm fine-grain print made directly from the original negative, exhibits some scratches and scuffing at the reel ends but is otherwise in fine shape, with rich gradations of black and white and sharp imagery. The restored soundtrack has varying levels of hiss and noise, likely a remnant of the original production sound. Shyam Bengal's 1984 feature-length documentary Satyajit Ray, a generous career retrospective highlighted by lengthy interview sequences with Ray, film clips and footage of Ray on the set of The Home and The World, is the highlight of the supplements gathered for this release. It is over two hours long and in English, Bengali and Hindi with English subtitles. Ray (who died in 1993) is also featured in a ten-minute 1981 roundtable discussion from French television with director Claude Sautet and film critic Michel Ciment (in French with English subtitles). Recorded specifically for this release are new video interviews with Ray biographer Andrew Robinson (running 17 minutes) and filmmaker Mira Nair (15 minutes). Also features a booklet with an original essay by critic Philip Kemp and reprints of a 1963 essay by Ray and a 1986 interview with the director about the film's music. For more information about The Music Room, visit The Criterion Collection. To order The Music Room, go to TCM Shopping. by Sean Axmaker