Astonishingly, folded in between the films that comprise the celebrated Apu Trilogy , are two movies inspired by Bengali literature and Sa...
Astonishingly, folded in between the films that comprise the celebrated Apu Trilogy, are two movies inspired by Bengali literature and Satyajit Ray’s association with two outstanding Bengali character actors: Tulsi Chakraborty in Parash Pathar and Chhabi Biswas in Jalsaghar. The first is perhaps minor (in spite of Chakraborty’s phenomenal performance) and is now mostly forgotten. However the latter is among the three or four greatest films in Ray’s oeuvre, and Chhabi Biswas’s performance is unsurpassed in his own illustrious career.
Elegiac in tone, Jalsaghar (The Music Room) is, to quote John Russell Taylor, “an atmospheric piece”. It occasionally reminds one of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, which was about the decline of a wealthy American Midwestern family in the late nineteenth century. The swansong of a stubborn and self-absorbed zamindar, Jalsaghar depicts the passing of the old feudal social order in early twentieth-century rural Bengal giving way to another that is bourgeois and perhaps coarser but more in tune with the future.
Chhabi Biswas plays the zamindar Biswambhar Roy who, at the beginning of the film, is already out of touch with reality and sunk in sorrow for his dead wife and only son. Rivalry with his nouveau riche neighbour Mahim Ganguly (Gangapada Bose) spurs him to reopen his music room and host a lavish...
