Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Days and Nights in the Forest, a restoration of Satyajit Ray's 1970 film, plays this week at the SIFF Uptown. Incidentally, the first Seattle screening of this film happened at Sanctuary (on the mezzanine of Scarecrow) in the mid-1990s!
There is so much in Days and Nights in the Forest that is layered with (in the same moment) comedy, character, place, and social comment. Take, for instance, the use of English in this mostly Bengali-language film. The main characters punctuate their speech with English phrases, or sometimes a single well-placed English word. There's a wonderful comic pop to a lot of this, whether the language is between the characters as inside jokes, or as odd standalone bits—for instance, the prospect of four men deciding not to shave for a few days prompts the whimsical comment, "All hippies." Other times, English can be used as snobbery, as ridicule, as irony. Of course, English is the colonialist language in India, and somehow in this milieu it never lands entirely innocently.
The milieu in question is the countryside, where four male (very male) friends have retreated for a getaway. During their days and nights in the forest—what an evocative title—they will have their complacent and self-satisfied attitudes challenged, but the method for this is never schematic. There is something dreamy about the whole thing, from the drifting camera, which seems under the spell of the outdoors, to the landscape itself, curiously un-lush for a forest, but exuding summertime headiness.
Satyajit Ray, who adapted the story from a 1968 novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay, was a decade and a half into his career, and the movie feels confident and unhurried. Explanations are at a minimum—there's one flashback that gives a glimpse at how one of the men, a cricketeer played by Samit Bhanja, has been jilted by a girlfriend (the flashback is worth it just for the revelation that the woman, played by Aparna Sen, dumps him because of his poor grammar). But otherwise the exposition comes in small traces; two of the friends, the ringleader (Soumitra Chaterjee, Ray's Apu in The World of Apu) and his bookish sidekick (Subhendu Chatterjee) make a brief reference to a literary journal they once published, and just this slim reference is enough to make us understand their vague unhappiness, having sold out former ambitions to achieve material comfort.
The fourth friend is the antic jester of the group, played by Rabi Ghosh (he's got the keenest instinct for how to make an English word land). The men are especially shaped by meeting two women: Sharmila Tagore as a dignified type who decides she will take the ringleader down a peg, and Kaberi Bose as her widowed sister-in-law. The latter has one of the film's most haunting moments; after a hot night at an outdoor carnival, she tries to get the bookish friend's attention by fixing him coffee and dressing up, the look on her face a mixture of hesitation and desire.
The movie can be described as a look at unexamined masculinity and classism and other things, but it is mysterious beyond all that. The way Ray sees people standing against a vast open field in the distance, as early-evening light seems to fade before our eyes, is somehow connected to his ability to view ambiguity in character and relationships, and to shrug off easy judgments. Days and Nights has a buoyant beauty that has something to do with people inhabiting the in-between times—like a getaway from the city that leads to a different rhythm, a different light, a break from the certainty of self.
And if that all sounds too much, this terrific movie also makes a great extended sequence out of people sitting outside and playing the memory game. Can something like that truly be cinematic? It can.
March 6, 2026
