Claiming a desire to shed civilization’s constraints, four male friends from the city take a vacation in the “forest” yet are ill prepared for all that awaits. Significantly altered from Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel to reflect people Ray knew, the bourgeois friends only think about their immediate needs, with little concern for the welfare of those in their way. The film maintains a deceptively breezy humor and lightness, matching the tone of their antics, until the arrival of Aparna and Jaya, fellow tourists who lure them down a path of self-reflection and revelation. With the celebrated memory game scene as its masterful centerpiece, the film achieves a multilayered exposé of their narcissism and neuroses through an accumulation of seemingly minor events and behaviors, eventually shattering the mythic images the men hold of themselves, the forest and its indigenous people—long ago defiled by their colonial forebears. Soumitra Chatterjee, as the alpha male Ashim, and Sharmila Tagore as Aparna, the voice of compassion, crucially reunite for the third time in a Ray film, their characters’ intersection offering the possibility of transformation in an alienated world.

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