J Paul Johnson
The acclaimed Indian director Satyajit Ray may be deservedly best known for his debut film, 1955’s sweet slice-of-life bildungsroman Pather Panchali, its having won eleven international prizes, including the inaugural Best Human Document award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival and led to the equally delightful and wise sequels forming the Apu Trilogy, 1956’s Aparajito (1956) and 1959’s Apur Sansar (The World of Apu). Those alone would be enough to make Ray one of the central voices in 20th century world cinema, but he went on to a long career directing 36 films, among them 29 feature films. This week, his 1970 carnivalesque drama Days and Nights in the Forest, recently restored and remastered in 4K, re-releases in North American cinemas, opening Friday, March 6 at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. The film is Ray at his mid-career finest, featuring both the director’s signature sensibilities and complex characterizations but in a more modern milieu and with a more studied perspective.
The premise of Days and Nights in the Forest is simple but rich with possibility. Four male twentysomething buddies—Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), Hari (Samit Bhanja), and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh)—take a long weekend’s drive from their workday grind in Calcutta to rural Palamu in Jharkhand, eager to spend some quality downtime relaxing, drinking, and, they hope, enjoying the company of the local women. In these early scenes, as they drive, stop for gas and directions, and squabble in the way male friends do, the four each display characteristics that will come into play as the drama unfolds.
Ashim, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, who had made his debut in Apur Sansar and became a longtime collaborator of Ray’s, is unquestionably the group’s leader. He owns the car and drives, making decisions for the group and swiftly keeping the others in their place. Bookish Sanjoy, comfortable in the backseat where he can bury his nose in a book, is his apparent second-in-command. Alongside him in the backseat is cricketeer Hari, surly and sleepy after having been dumped by a girlfriend. They yield shotgun to the shorter, slightly balding doofus Shekhar, whose bad jokes and social awkwardness they willingly tolerate despite his being unemployed and prone to gambling loss.
When after a time they arrive at the sylvan bungalow where they hope to stay, Ray’s themes begin to emerge. The residences are closed to those who don’t already hold a reservation, but Ashim is not used to being told “no.” The watchman tells him he’ll lose his job if he allows them to stay, but Ashim won’t leave. Instead, he demands his bribe be accepted, and soon the four are enjoying the digs. They demand coffee, tea, and dinner from the watchman, even though the man’s wife is ill and cannot assist; a local boy is dispatched for groceries and other duties. The four friends exude a casual and unearned privilege they blithely assume will secure them the creature comforts to which they feel entitled.
Soon enough, they meet a few of the local women. Horny Hari falls for a local lush Duri, who wants to exploit the handsome athlete for more drink. Later, the four are invited to the home of a local family whose patriarch lives with two beguiling young women. One is his daughter, the mischievous, worldly Aparna (played by longtime Ray collaborator Sharmila Tagore, who played Soumitra Chatterjee’s wife back in Apur Sansar), with whom the overconfident Ashim is immediately smitten. The other is his widowed daughter-in-law Jaya (Kaberi Bose), in contrast to Aparna a little older and more conventionally traditional, draws the attention of the quieter Sanjoy.
One of Ray’s greatest strengths as a director is to provide slowly, surely developing traits that deepen characterizations and foster growing conflicts. Here in Days and Nights in the Forest, Ashim’s blithe privilege is rattled by Aparna’s complexity and intelligence. When he first meets her and is invited to her small room, it’s clear she is no simple rube: alongside the Indian sitar-and-tabla duets of Vilayat Khan and Bismillah Khan, she listens to The Beatles (Rubber Soul, the first of their records to feature the Indian sitar) and Joan Baez. She reads widely, from metaphysical poetry and modern drama to philosophy, including Alan Isaacs’ The Survival of God in the Scientific Age, which pointedly questions whether religious faith can coexist with scientific, rational thought. Later, when on a picnic the group plays a simple memory game, Aparna lets Ashim win, even though she knows perfectly well the winning sequence.
Each of the other men similarly find their insular worldview disrupted by their interactions with the locals, many of them leading to a climax for Days and Nights in the Forest at a bazaar they attend together. While Ashim is beguiled but bewildered by Aparna’s beauty and intelligence, the dim, quick-tempered Hari sees Duli only as an easy lay and domestic worker. Worse, when his billfold disappears, he quickly accuses their houseboy of having stolen it and roughs him up, even though the boy has an airtight alibi. When the the widowed sister-in-law Jaya reveals her desires to geeky Sanjoy, he can’t entertain the thought of genuine human connection and freezes, unintentionally delivering a stinging rejection. Shekhar, meanwhile, is no ladies’ man: he borrows money from the others only to gamble it away.
All of these conflicts develop naturally and gradually so that by the narrative’s conclusion, all four men have experienced a change, whether through comeuppance or epiphany. Hari, beaten savagely by the boy he’d wrongly accused, must prostrate himself for Shekhar’s assistance. Ashim realizes that his casual privilege and lack of character make him a poor match for Aparna, who has lived a life of trauma. Sanjoy, humbled by the openness of seduction, can only bury his head back in his books. At its start, there is no telling just where Days and Nights in the Forest will go; by its conclusion, Ray makes evident that it was headed there all along, if only we had his foresight to see it so.
Those familiar with Ray’s other dramas will recognize instantly the director’s naturalist compositions and lighting. There are few, if any, instances of camera bravura. Satyajit Ray and longtime cinematographer Soumenda Roy instead let the camera follow his characters, see what they see, and register their reactions. Only on occasion will he let an image linger long enough to bring attention to an inanimate object worthy of attention, but when he does—like letting Ashim peruse Aparna’s record collection and bookshelf—the content is always significant. Ray’s direction is, as always, focused more on the human drama unfolding as characters observe and interact with each other, each new sequence revealing just a bit more about them—and about the human condition, more generally.
While Days and Nights in the Forest is an adaptation of a well-regarded 1968 novel of the same name by Sunil Gangopadhyay, Ray’s approach is not slavishly faithful. He bought the screen rights, according to biographer David Robinson, having seen only an outline in a magazine advertisement. He inserted the book Sanjay reads, a late-nineteenth-century study of the Palamu region by Sanjib
Chattopadhyay, as a means of motivating the group of friends’ journey and emphasizing the colonialist and outdated viewpoints that inform them. He further deepened each of the four’s characterizations to the point where the novelist Gangopadhyay was shocked, but reportedly won over by the strength of the film.
Shot on location in Palamu in 1969, Days and Nights in the Forest was released in India in early 1970, then later that year nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin. Only in 1973 did it receive a brief North American theatrical release in New York City, leading to ecstatic reviews heralding the film as a return to the existential humanism of Ray’s best earlier films. (Ray’s work has often been better received abroad than in his native India, with some criticism of his films there focusing on the representation of India’s poor, beginning with Pather Panchali.)
Sadly, it’s never been easy to see Days and Nights in the Forest in the decades that followed. There was a VHS release, but never a DVD or Blu-ray. This restoration, taking some six years in the process, is conducted by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Film Heritage Foundation, Janus Films, and the Criterion Collection—suggesting its potential future release on 4K UHD there. The restoration, completed using the original camera and sound negative preserved by Purnima Dutta and magnetic track preserved at the BFI National Archive, looks spectacular, preserving the film’s fine grain and complex gradation. A few frames here and there apparently could not be restored and are visibly subpar compared to the rest of the film, but certainly this version, which premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, is as fine a restoration as one could hope to see.
Moreover, this new restoration reintroduces cinephiles everywhere to one of the medium’s greatest director’s most meaningful and well-constructed films. With its complex characterizations and graceful narrative construction, Days and Nights in the Forest methodically deconstructs the casual privilege of modern masculinity and deepens our collective understanding of Indian class divisions with a simple and impactful gravitas. It is not as daring as many great films of its era in terms of its psychology, genre, subject matter, or technique, but it is Satyajit Ray at his most direct and confident, and that is something always, always well worth watching.
