A Film Canon

This beautiful film fuses sight and sound into a single, preternatural act of aristocratic labour; or, alternatively, presents aristocratic decline as a gradual disentanglement and demystification of sight and sound, as deteriorating landlord Huzur Roy (Chabbi Biswas) finds himself physically unable to hear the surrounding landscape - especially the river and its embankments, which form the pretext for both his personal and financial debilitation - and economically unable to sustain the kind of musical spectacle that defined his earlier years. To this end, Ray structures the film around a single, extended musical performance, accompanied by dancer Roshan Kamuri, from which the ceremonial characterisation, intricately choreographed blocking and, above all, the constant, geometric panning is extrapolated, the latter simultaneously tracing sight-lines, delineating musical phrases, and elaborating the parameters of Roy's mansion. The result is an extraordinary, crystalline mise-en-scene, in which every object seems to ripple with the sheer intensity of sensory currents passing across it, and Roy's elegaic tears are transubstantiated straight into glass, whether in the form of his quivering mirror - a wall of sorrow, deeper than any other space in the film - or the chandelier that proffers the music's most immediate, sensitive audience.