The Music Room

Satyajit Ray's The Music Room is the kind of movie that Eisenstein gloried in: history driven to allegory and given force by brilliant cinematic techniques.

Ray tells the story of an aristocrat whose pride and obsession with music take from him first his fortune and family, later his reason and life. Set against him throughout and surviving him at last is one of the new businessmen, a greased, grotesque man of the sort who scorns religion by spitting in the holy water. The action is ineluctable, the outcome foregone and well-augured. The end is a wild, terrible gallop. The old horse rears to avoid running onto the bow of an abandoned boat and the Zamindar falls, his prized blood dampening the sand.

Ray is at his best in the lushness of the palace rooms. He has Eisenstein's passion for objects, particularly chandeliers, and for pageantry. By rapid cutting from dancer to objects to this or that on-looker he gives motion to ceremonies which I imagine would be otherwise tedious to Occidentals. In fact, it is chiefly through the visual manipulations that the movie is comprehensible to Westerners. A few scenes, shot by the walls of the palace or on its roof, recall the periods of magical quiet in the courtyard episodes in Rasho Mon, and it is at these times that the film seems most strange and foreign.

Chabi Riswas, one of India's leading actors, plays the aristocrat. He has the imperious laugh and slightly flacid look of the landowner and master. When he mounts for the last charge, he must be revered, not because he is himself endearing, but because the alternative is a world of half-smoked cigarettes and tooting car horns. He is the only character in the movie who is more than the stock figure of a class or station.

The music, which Ray composed, may be wonderful. I do not know. It is at least interesting and does not reduce the virtues of a film dramatically and visually exciting.