Milan Kundera is a celebrated Franco-Czech novelist. It is disconcerting to realise that his position as a remarkable cultural critic, however, hasn’t yet been acknowledged. In his essay on the painter Francis Bacon, after giving Bacon’s views on the master playwright Samuel Beckett (as has been oft-quoted by this writer so ignore the repetition), Kundera writes, “When one artist talks about the other, he is always talking — indirectly, in a roundabout way — about himself and that is what’s valuable in his judgment.”

Satyajit Ray was an iconic Indian filmmaker, known for his hyper realistic, off-the-beaten-track cinema. There will hardly be any institute in the world where filmmaking is taught that doesn’t use his films as part of their syllabi. Ray was also a writer of decent merit. He wrote quite a few mystery novels and short stories, mainly targeting the younger audiences. Obviously, it was his extraordinary ability to make remarkable movies that eclipsed all other aspects of his creative self.

When Netflix India announced that it was making an anthology of four movies based on Ray’s stories — titled, of course, Ray — it generated a great deal of excitement among his myriad admirers. How would today’s generation of creative souls handle the tales told by a genius who died a little before the digital medium began to take root, and ‘indirectly talk about themselves’? How would the younger demographic of streaming websites’ subscribers receive the stories?

Well, barring some negligible linguistic hiccups, Ray is a fine confluence of tried and tested text-based content and contemporary, visually opulent storytelling.

Four contemporary filmmakers adapt four films by iconic auteur Satyajit Ray in Netflix’s latest offering, Ray

The Films

The first film, directed by Srijit Mukherji (Autograph, Begum Jaan, Chotuskone) and vivaciously filmed by Swapnil Sonawane, is called Forget Me Not. Ali Fazal plays, pretty incisively, the character of Ipsit, a corporate wolf, who is a partner in a company called Chrysalis. He is married with a baby and has had a colourful past. His life changes when a girl runs into him at a bar and tells him about an amorous encounter with him, of which he has no memory. This remembrance, or the lack of it, turns his mind into a can of worms.

The second piece is Behrupiya [Imposter] helmed by the same director. Kay Kay Menon essays the lead role of Indrashish, a meek make-up artist who has been overlooked and treated as a non-entity by his loved ones in particular and society in general. Having had enough of humiliation, he decides to take revenge on personal and impersonal levels using his make-up skills, making the story come across as a mini crime thriller. It’s not.

The penultimate movie, Hangama Hai Kyun Barpa [Why The Hullabaloo], in terms of artistic elegance and verisimilitude, is the most likable. The title is taken from a line of a ghazal sung by Ghulam Ali. Although the direction by Abhishek Chaubey (Ishqiya, Urrta Punjab, Kaminay) is right out of the top drawer, it’s the two brilliant actors Manoj Bajpayee and Gajraj Rao — who play the central roles of Musafir Ali and Aslam Beg — that don’t let the attention of the viewer waver even for a nanosecond. Their few scenes in the compartment of a train are modern-day classic cinema sequences. Kleptomania is the ostensible subject of the story. The subtext: it’s all about human nature.

The final offering is Spotlight with Vasan Bala (Psycho Raman, Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota) in the director’s seat. Here, Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor plays Vik, a movie star who is famous for his single ‘look’. Like all film actors, he is fond of the limelight. But he suffers a rude shock when a religious leader Didi (Radhika Madan), who is more popular than him and has countless die-hard followers, becomes part of his story. The hotel room where he is staying for a shoot is taken from him to be given to Didi. In his failed effort to outshine her, he cottons on to the fact that there are professions in life that wield more power and have more pelf than the one he is associated with.

The Verdict

For audiences that have become accustomed to women-centric projects on OTT and mainstream platforms, Ray will take time to be appreciated wholeheartedly. Yes, it has flaws. Which anthology doesn’t? But those shortcomings are to do with the build-up to the climax that takes slightly longer than the required time to get to the point — particularly in the cases of Forget Me Not and Behrupiya, at the cost of diminishing the emotional quotient of the plot.

On the whole, the directors appear to be fully aware of how to contemporarise subject matters that Ray himself would have filmed in an entirely different way. The camerawork is elegant and poetic in all four films, especially the first. Being poetic is important in this context, because we live in times where filmmakers do not pay enough heed to the literary side of filmmaking. Think Kieslowski. Think Bergman. Even in 2018, visual poetry was beautifully employed by another Indian director, Shoojit Sircar in October.

At the heart of it all, however, is: men. Flawed, talented, vulnerable — Shakespearean tragic heroes on a smaller scale. When was the last time anyone saw that study being conducted in cinema?

The outstanding part of Ray the series, however, is the actors’ input. Ali Fazal has established himself as a credible actor. Kay Kay Menon has reaffirmed his versatility. There are chances that Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor will now be approached for meaty roles, though he still needs to work on his voice projection. And Manoj Bajpayee and Gajraj Rao have proved that in a worthy film, despite being categorised as director’s medium, quality acting can turn a work of fiction into an unmistakably believable story. If only Manoj had uttered some of the words, such as maraz (meaning ailment; he pronounced it marz) and phrases correctly, it would’ve been an unblemished performance.

Published in Dawn, ICON, July 25th, 2021