Ray, Satyajit - John Coleman

JOHN COLEMAN

Company Limited has a bleak, slightly off-key title to British ears and this quality of getting things just that shade wrong is an element in what it is all about. The film takes its place in a trio (the other two, Days and Nights in the Forest and The Adversary) concerned with the effects of what we did to India and Indians. We left them a language, English, and a way of life not unconnected with capitalism. These facts Mr Ray now occupies himself with stressing and, under their impact, he seems to be producing increasingly unnerved and unnerving movies….

If one leans on the pictorial style, it is because it is nearly consistently ugly, harsh, almost as if Ray had decided (and, for heaven's sake, he worked under Renoir and himself made the visually ravishing Charulata) to send up a gamut of Hollywood postures…. Noises, the dialogue, the eerily clumsy or parody appearance of things begin to come together into a...

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