"It adds years to your life," the young men from Calcutta in Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest say of the country quiet, and it's easy to believe. Ray's images are so emotionally saturated that they become suspended in time and, in some cases, fixed forever. Satyajit Ray's films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director. I think it must be because our involvement with his characters is so direct that we are caught up in a blend of the fully accessible and the inexplicable, the redolent, the mysterious. We accept the resolutions he effects not merely as resolutions of the stories but as truths of human experience. Yet it isn't only a matter of thinking, Yes, this is the way it is. What we assent to is only a component of the pattern of associations in his films; to tell the stories does not begin to suggest what the films call to mind or why they're so moving. There is always a residue of feeling that isn't resolved. Two young men sprawled on a porch after a hot journey, a drunken group doing the Twist in the dark on a country road, Sharmila Tagore's face lit by a cigarette lighter, her undulating walk in a sari—the images are suffused with feeling and become overwhelmingly, sometimes unbearably beautiful. The emotions that are imminent may never develop, but we're left with the sense of a limitless yet perhaps harmonious natural drama that the characters are part of. There are always larger, deeper associations impending; we recognize the presence of the mythic in the ordinary. And it's the mythic we're left with after the ordinary has been (temporarily) resolved. (p. 140)

On the surface, [Days and Nights in the Forest] is a lyrical romantic comedy about four educated young men from Calcutta driving together for a few days in the country, their interrelations, and what happens to them in the forest, which is both actual and metaphorical. As the men rag each other and bicker, we quickly sort them out. Ashim is a rising executive and the natural leader of the group. Lordly and disdainful to underlings, he is the worst-behaved; the most intelligent, he is also the most dissatisfied with his life and himself—he feels degraded…. Ashim is much like what Apu might have turned into if he had been corrupted, and he is played by Soumitra Chatterji, who was Apu in The World of Apu. On this holiday in the forest, Ashim meets Aparna, played by the incomparably graceful Sharmila Tagore…. In his fine book on the Apu Trilogy, Robin Wood wrote that the physical and spiritual beauty of Soumitra Chatterji and Sharmila Tagore seems "the ideal incarnation of Ray's belief in human potentialities." And I think they represent that to Ray, and inspire him to some of his finest work (he used them also in Devi) because they are modern figures with overtones of ancient deities. Unlike the other characters in Days and Nights in the Forest, they bridge the past and the future and—to some degree—India and the West. As Ray uses them, they embody more than we can consciously grasp. But we feel it: when Sharmila Tagore in her sunglasses and white slacks stands still for a second, she's a creature of fable—the image carries eternity. Even her melodious voice seems old and pure, as if it had come through fire. (p. 141)

Underneath their love story, and the stories of Ashim's companions, there's the melancholy and corruption of their class and country. In a quiet way, the subtext is perhaps the subtlest, most plangent study of the cultural tragedy of imperialism the screen has ever had. It is the tragedy of the bright young generation who have internalized the master race (like many of the refugees from Hitler who came to America); their status identity is so British that they treat all non-Anglicized Indians as non-persons. The caste system and the British attitudes seem to have conspired to turn them into self-parodies—clowns who ape the worst snobberies of the British…. We don't laugh at them, though, because they're achingly conscious of being anachronistic and slightly ridiculous. When we see them playing tennis in the forest, the image is so ambiguous that our responses come in waves. (pp. 141-42)

[Ray's] means as a director are among the most intuitively right in all moviemaking: he knows when to shift the camera from one face to another to reveal the utmost, and he knows how to group figures in a frame more expressively than anyone else. He doesn't butt into a scene; he seems to let it play itself out. His understatement makes most of what is thought of as film technique seem unnecessary, and even decadent, because he does more without it. (No Western director has been able to imitate him.) The story is told with great precision at the same time that the meanings and associations multiply. Ray seems to add something specifically Eastern to the "natural" style of Jean Renoir. Renoir, too, put us in unquestioning and total—yet discreet—contact with his people, and everything seemed fluid and easy, and open in form. But Renoir's time sense is different. What is distinctive in Ray's work (and it may be linked to Bengali traditions in the arts, and perhaps to Sanskrit) is that sense of imminence—the suspension of the images in a larger context. The rhythm of his films seems not slow but, rather, meditative, as if the viewer could see the present as part of the past and could already reflect on what is going on. There is a rapt, contemplative quality in the beautiful intelligence of his ideal lovers. (p. 142)

No artist has done more than Satyajit Ray to make us reëvaluate the commonplace. And only one or two other film artists of his generation—he's just past fifty—can make a masterpiece that is so lucid and so inexhaustibly rich. At one point, the four young blades and the two women sit in a circle on picnic blankets and play a memory game that might be called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; it's a pity that James Agee didn't live to see the films of Satyajit Ray, which fulfill Agee's dreams. (p. 143)