 |
| Soumitra Chatterjee and Swatilekha Sengupta |
Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) is a historical film foregrounded by a love triangle. This film released in 1984 is based on the 1916 novel of the same title by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore also wrote song lyrics and some of these songs find their way into this film adaptation. Both book and film center on Nikhil (Victor Banerjee), a Bengali noble and his wife, Bimala (Swatilekha Sengupta). Nikhil is Western and progressive leaning, for 1907 and his wife follows suit. Their relative domestic bliss is ruptured when nationalist leader and longtime friend, Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee) arrives to visit. Sandip is a charismatic speaker and ladies man who is agitating against British rule. Nikhil doesn't want Bimala to live a cloistered life and practically serves her to Sandip on a plate. She responds to his charms and events lead to a tragic ending.
The novel expresses Tagore's ambivalent attitude towards India's emerging nationalism. As pointed out by Andrew Robinson in his Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, still the best book in English on Ray, the character of Nikhil articulates Tagore's qualms concerning Hindu ethnocentrism. In 1905, Lord Curzon had divided Bengal into Hindu and Muslim sections; the latter corresponding roughly to the present state of Bangladesh. This was a portent of the eventual partitioning of India in 1947, at which time Ray first wrote a screenplay adaptation of the novel. Sandip is shown exploiting this issue and stoking ethnic violence by calling for a ban on foreign trade, a measure which would hurt poor Muslim merchants the most. Nikhil sees Sandip for what he is politically and as an exploiter of women, for Bimala is merely a link on his chain of fools. Nikhil's apparent diffidence is a problem dramatically, but Ray, serene in his dotage, captures his peculiar aura of resigned fatalism. Ghare Baire is a studiously conducted chamber play in a languorous mansion full of wonders and wondrous kitsch. We do see scenes of the world outside Nikhil's mansion, but sparingly.
The deliberate pacing of the film and its political background may make this a hard film to get into. It reminds me of late Visconti in its decorous lassitude. What gave me an insight that opened up the film for me was Ray's direction of Gopa Aich, a neophyte cast as Nikhil's widowed sister-in-law. She wears white to denote her widowhood, a portent.The role is ridiculous. The woman is bored and not too subtly enamored with Nikhil. Ray directs the actress broadly, as if she were a diva in a comic opera. The film uses music throughout with songs in both Bengali and English. Ray shoots this chamber play as if it were an opera, again akin to Visconti. There are duos and trios and the usual tra-la-la triangle. The three leads make their characters sing. Ray had a heart attack while filming, his place was taken by his son, Sandip, who followed his father's instructions. This circumstance has led to Ghare Baire being treated as a lesser effort in the Ray canon, but I found it to be a fully integrated masterpiece.
Ghare Baire has just been released on disc by Criterion as part of its Eclipse series in a set entitled Late Ray. The other two films in the set are two other late Ray entries, An Enemy of the People and The Stranger. An Enemy of the People is dull and tired, an overly earnest and static attempt to transpose Ibsen's play to 1989 India. Why Ray tacked on a Frank Capra style ending onto the material is beyond me. The bedraggled Steve McQueen version is more interesting. Ray's final film, The Stranger, shares many of the same players as An Enemy of the People, but is a appreciably livelier film. There is color, song, dance, and even a few exterior scenes. Ray's screenplay is reminiscent of Ghare Baire: an interloper temporarily upsets an established domestic balance. In this case, the stranger of the title is a long lost uncle of dubious provenance. The intrigue is slim, but The Stranger has its modest charms.
