A Tragedy of Pride

The Music Room. A fat old man sits on the roof of a rotting palace and stares emptily across an empty plain. A servant appears.

"What month is it?" the old man murmurs.

"It is the Month of the Falcon," the servant replies.

"Ah, then it is spring."

The servant goes away. The old man puffs at his pipe and stares across the plain.

Be warned. The fat old man on the roof is the hero of this movie, and movies about fat old men who don't even know what month it is are clearly not for everybody, especially if the old man speaks Bengali and the English subtitles twitch. Besides, the film is about 20 minutes too long. But people with a tolerance for the bizarre will greet this work by India's Satyajit Ray (who made the magnificent Apu trilogy) as a subtle and poignant tragedy of pride, the story of a man who cut his own throat to remind the world that his blood was blue.

The fat old man is a zamindar, a baron, and his ancestors for centuries before him were zamindars. In his youth he lived carelessly on inherited wealth, imagining that it would last forever. But the rising middle class was not careless, and soon some of the zamindar's neighbors were richer than he. Partly to assert his superiority, partly to gratify his passion for music, he took to regaling his acquaintances at lavish musical evenings. When his dutiful wife warned him that it was costing too much to pay the piper, he waved her away. "If I cut corners I shall lose face."

At last his credit ran out and his estates were sold. To finance a final fling in the music room, the zamindar sold his wife's jewels. His wife and son were visiting her family at the time, but he insisted that they pack up and come home for the affair. On the way down the river they were caught in a whirlpool and drowned.

All that was long ago. Now, a fat old man sits on the roof of a rotting palace and stares emptily across an empty plain.

In the tragedy of the zamindar Director Ray involves much more than the ruin of one man. He is a skillful social satirist, and he contrives sardonic contrasts between the haughty old-rich and the pushy new-rich. He is a gifted graphic artist in whose visions the physical and the metaphysical converge--late in the film, the music room, the locus of disaster in the zamindar's life, is suddenly unshuttered and exhales into the pallid twilight a black flock of bats that flutter soundlessly above the old man's head like powers of darkness portending his death.

Above all, Director Ray is a teller of tales, a Bengali Balzac who envisions personal tragedy as a part of the human comedy, who can see the universal in the unique. He has created in the zamindar a character both peculiarly Indian and profoundly human, a man who would not face the truth and therefore had to face the consequences. As Actor Chhabi Biswas portrays him, the zamindar is a seething complex of contradictions: arrogant yet sensitive, pigheaded as well as lionhearted. He is a fool but there is something magnificent in his folly, and even at his most fatuous there sits upon him the ennobling dignity of doom.

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