Satyajit Ray and His Creations Still Feel Contemporary

Sharmila Tagore, Satyajit Ray's cinema is all about lasting power. Something known, acknowledged and celebrated, time and again, and underscored once more at the recent screening of the restored version of his 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) at the Cannes Film Festival in its Cannes Classics segment.

- NAMRATA JOSHI |

Sharmila Tagore, Satyajit Ray's cinema is all about lasting power. Something known, acknowledged and celebrated, time and again, and underscored once more at the recent screening of the restored version of his 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) at the Cannes Film Festival in its Cannes Classics segment. "Ray and his creations have lived on. They still speak to the viewers and feel contemporary," says Tagore, two days after the screening, on her return to India from a very rushed trip to the French Riviera.

Tagore had presented the film along with her co-actor Simi Garewal in the presence of the renowned American filmmaker Wes Anderson, among others. Anderson participated in and has supported the film's 4K restoration by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project at L'Immagine Ritrovata, together with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's Film Heritage Foundation, Janus Films and Criterion Collection. It was financed by the Golden Globe Foundation and made from the original camera negative and sound preserved by Purnima Dutta, and the magnetic track stored in the BFI National Archive.

Tagore feels that the sense of contemporaneity holds especially true for Aranyer Din Ratri and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), the film with which made her acting debut. The other three films she worked with Ray were Devi (Goddess, 1960), Nayak (The Hero, 1966) and Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971). "Apur Sansar's romance is eternal. It still excites and thrills in its simplicity and touches a chord," she says.

Describing Aranyer Din Ratri as the story of a playful encounter between four young men and three young women, the Cannes writeup on the film called it free-spirited and radiant in its appeal. Based on Sunil Gangopadhyay's novel of the same name, Ray turns it into a portrait of the bourgeoisie Indian youth of the times and a peep into the class, gender and urban-rural dynamics, differences and divides.