Days And Nights In The Forest begins as a simple, rural road trip undertaken by some Kolkata city boys, driving a few hundred miles away from home into the dense foliage of the Palamu district. Somewhere between modern-day poverty tourists and colonial exoticists (they treat the English language with a striver’s reverence), the men read from a travelogue about the area’s beautiful, sexually free native women and the mental liberation found away from the urban world. The four pals all expect something big from this trip—whether that means healing a broken heart, like cricket meathead Hari (Samit Bhanja); soothing the wounds of the rat race, like burgeoning big shot Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee); or validating their intellectual cosplaying, like with the cowardly Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee). Yet, they’re so caught up in their own middle-class ways of being that any change will be hard-earned, and will leave plenty of collateral damage in its wake.
Even Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh), the group’s squirrelly and perpetually broke comic relief—a balding Joe Pesci figure as short as his fuse—has aspirations of getting back to basics. He confirms with the rest of his pals, as soon as they arrive at their destination (a government-owned bungalow they bribe their way into, the first of many rules these men believe do not apply to them), that none of them will be shaving for the duration of their stay. Real bachelor living out in the boonies! That promise holds up for about a second, when, after spending a night getting toasted on a potent local brew, the bored gang immediately starts prowling around for women.
Their browbeaten guide, an impoverished man they pluck from the side of the road, leads them to some fellow out-of-towners: Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law Jaya (Kaberi Bose). The poised pair initially seem to contrast with the local Indigenous Santhal women, like Duli (Simi Garewal, radiant despite being buried in brownface), whom Hari lusts after. But soon, it’s apparent that the women have plenty in common—specifically, a common need to put up with men.
The guys are funny on their own, but with the women, whom they try to impress and seduce, their middle-manager tyrannies and yuppie cruelties glare in the sunlight. Their weakness and fragility tumbles out, like a tourist’s tell in front of a townie. It adds itchy tension to all their interactions—even if, like a charged moment between Jaya and Sanjoy, that tension can take on a boldly sexual element. The honest and unfettered gestures and conversations occur mainly between the men, especially at night and especially a few drinks deep. Days And Nights In The Forest is excellent drunken cinema, the camera flipping between their faces lined up at the barroom table before cutting away to their blackout revelries in the dark of a dirt road. (It’s also telling that everything comes to a head at a rowdy village carnival.) These moments, and a sequence where they’re caught outside bathing, are no less embarrassing than their more pretentious foibles, but at least they’re vulnerable.
The most famous sequence of the Days And Nights In The Forest, though, is perhaps its most guarded. A long memory game—where the men and women go around a picnic blanket adding to a repeated list of famous names—becomes a tense battle of wills and a layered struggle to seem sophisticated. Aparna and Ashim duke it out as the final two, specifying which Kennedy they mean and name-dropping literary giants and Communist revolutionaries, and the result of the match is just as revealing as the bravado-laden game itself. It’s a hypnotic moment familiar to anyone who’s secreted invisible flirtations inside an icebreaker, and a favorite of Wes Anderson, who paid direct homage to it in Asteroid City.
Anderson, a devoted Ray fan, also helped spearhead the restoration of a film he called “a clash/negotiation between castes and sexes” that’s about “selfish men and their hopes and cruelties and spectacular lack of wisdom” and the “women who see through them.” Packing all that into a few days in a cabin takes the elegance of a great short story (the film adapts Sunil Ganguly’s novel) and an eye for human behavior that can see the great meanings roiling underneath everyday activities. Days And Nights In The Forest isn’t just a Deliverance-style film about condescending urbanites getting their comeuppance, nor is it purely a feminist text about piercing the universal male ego. There are elements of both in Ray’s film, which berates and assaults the men for their shared callousness, but also lets them get away with the kinds of flawed entitlements common to well-enough-off men running amok in a patriarchy. The criticism isn’t especially subtle, but compared to contemporary movies about friends on the make, its observations cut through the thicket, seeing the forest and trees with equal clarity.
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