One of director Satyajit Ray’s greatest achievements begins with the deceptively easy grace of a buddy comedy—only to give way to darker moral shading. Seeking a weekend escape from the city, four friends from Kolkata embark on a driving trip to the countryside, where their urban entitlement and prejudices are gradually exposed. Among these young bachelors is the overconfident Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), who finds his self-assurance shaken by Aparna (the radiant Sharmila Tagore), an enigmatic young woman whose cool intellect conceals turbulent emotional depths. Filmed luminously amid the sun-dappled splendor of the woodlands of India’s Palamu region, Days and Nights in the Forest deconstructs the masculine ego and India’s fraught class divisions with elegant complexity.
