The plot of the movie goes back to a similar outing the writer Sunil Gangopadhyay took in the early days of his poetic career. The story unfolds around a group of four friends, who despite their differences, bond deeply. The four friends are all educated and come from different layers of society, but the urge to escape the daily grind of city life forces them to wander in tribal lands.
Of the four friends, Asim, the leader of the pack, owns the car they drive in, has a cushy job, likes the company of girls and yet is very conscious of how he should be perceived by them. Sanjoy is a labour executive but would ideally want to immerse himself in literature. Hari, a frank and straightforward cricketer, wants to forget the girl who dumped him. Shekhar is the jester, the only one without a job. He has a roving eye but stays sober when his friends get drunk and vent their frustrations.
They set out for the tribal Palamau, in Bihar. They had read legends about this land, the tribal women who are open, simple and beautiful. Wanting to break rules, they forcefully stay at a forest rest house by bribing the chowkidar. The stay symbolizes their distance from city life and civilization: they wonder whether to shave or not. Hari gets close to tribal Santhal girl Duli when she approaches the group for extra drink.
Their resolve to be unshaven collapses when Shekhar sees two ladies Aparna and her sister-in-law Jaya in the forest. They introduce themselves to their family. The two urban groups of people are almost relieved to find each other here. Asim flirts with Aparna and coaxes her to show her room. He is attracted to the elegant and enigmatic Aparna, but is unable to keep pace with her composure, presence of mind and intelligence. At night the four friends go to drink alcohol again in the country liquor house. Hari is upset because he cannot see Duli whom he had met the previous night. While returning to their rest house, they stumble upon a car which they shout at without realising it is that of Aparna and Jaya. They oversleep and miss the next day's breakfast at Jaya's place. They find a tiffin outside their rooms and go to Aparna's house to return it. Later, the conservator visits the forest rest house and catches them staying at the Forest Bungalow without permission. When they are about to be kicked out, Aparna, the conservator's acquaintance, manages the situation with her natural grace and composure. The group decides to chat and play a game while Aparna's father is away with Jaya's son. The game reaches a crescendo, with only Asim and Aparna left in the fray, at which point Aparna pulls out, deliberately handing victory to Asim, who seems to have placed his entire confidence at stake on the win.
The tensions peak at the village fair where the four friends go their own way. Shekhar goes off to gamble with money borrowed from Asim. Hari takes Duli into the forest and has sex with her. Asim feels his pride and self-confidence shattered when Aparna reveals her more vulnerable side behind her composed exterior. She also holds up a mirror to his bourgeois and urban insensitivity by pointing out how despite having spent three days at the bungalow, he and his friends never bothered to inquire about the chowkidar's wife. Meanwhile, Shekhar finds himself helping all his friends (especially Hari, when the latter gets injured and robbed), despite being fondly considered to be the buffoon of the gang. Sanjoy, held back by his bourgeois moralities, is unable to respond to Jaya's bold advances.
The next morning, the four friends leave for Calcutta since their new friends have had to return in a hurry. As a parting gift, they find a can of boiled eggs sent by the thoughtful Jaya.
Critics praised it heavily worldwide. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael felt that "Satyajit Ray’s films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director.... No artist has done more than Ray to make us reevaluate the commonplace." In Reeling, Kael added: "A major film by one of the great film artists, starring Soumitra Chatterjee and the incomparably graceful Sharmila Tagore."[3]David Robinson wrote in the Financial Times, "Every word and gesture is recognizable, comprehensible, true ... Ray's work at its best, like this, has an extraordinary rightness in every aspect of its selection and presentation - the timing, performance, cutting, music - which seem to place it beyond discussion."[4]Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his list of '1000 ESSENTIAL FILMS', kept this film as one of his favourite films released in 1970. The New York Times described the film
as a ‘rare, wistful movie that somehow proves it’s good to be alive.’ British film critic Tom Milne praised the film writing “Ray gradually distils a magical world of absolute stasis: a shimmering summer’s day, a tranquil forest clearing, the two women strolling in a shady avenue, wistful yearnings as love and the need for love echo plangently… Beautifully shot and acted, it’s probably Ray’s masterpiece.”[5]
But the Village Voice critic, William Paul, was one of the detractors of the movie in the West. He wrote, "Days and Nights seems anachronistically the ideal art-house film of the 50s: vaguely humanistic without any feeling for the complexities of human life, pretentious, short on plot but striving to be long on character, stylistically awkward as a sign of sincere emotions, and all of it held together by a title that is more poetic than anything in the movie itself" (Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, The Biography of a Master Film-Maker, by Andrew Robinson, Bloomsbury Academic, reprinted 2022, 181).
Robinson remarked, "Both the admirers and the detractors in the West were convinced that the film was transparent to them. They seemed unaware that many of its 'words and gestures' might conceal an unfamiliar world"(ibid, 181).
References
^Cooper, Darius (Spring–Summer 1999). "The Carnivalesque in Satyajit Ray's Nights and Days in the Forest (1970)". Asian Cinema. 10 (2): 145–150. doi:10.1386/ac10.2.145_3.
