ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
Morpheus
By ISABEL QUIGLY
Charulata. (Paris-Pullman, 'U' certificate.)—The Collector. (Columbia, 'X' certificate.) IT isn't hard to make your readers agog for, say, The Red Desert or The Birds, for Antoni- oni can sound intriguing or Hitchcock thrilling on paper. But very much harder to send them panting with eagerness to the Apu trilogy. Be- cause some film-makers are describable, trans- ferable, practically palpable, but not Satyajit Ray, who all too easily, sounds, if you haven't seen him, an outsize, prize-bedecked bore. Like Lampedusa or Pasternak, he became a modern classic overnight, and like them suffers from cloudy adulation. But the real trouble is that the cloudiness is inevitable, because you can't really describe him at all, only his effect, his atmosphere, his feeling: saying what his films are 'about' is like, trying to say what A Passage to India is about (a spinster scared in a cave?).
You can talk about the lyrical simplicity of his images and the acute sophistication with which he looks at them, about the way .he salts a formal beauty, rich, ripe, sweet, almost cloying, with a quizzical attitude, meets those enormous melting eyes of his characters, male or female, with a faintly raised eyebrow, and to pathos and nostalgia brings, not briskness exactly, but a sort of tender deflation, a pitiful hindsight. But none of this really gives an idea of his effect, that sense of sleep and heat and endless afternoons, at once unforgettable, and soporific, like the best dreams and the longest-lasting memories; or the way one film runs into the next, and it is Ray in general rather than any one film in particular that lives on—his mood, his weather, his light, the sounds he uses and even the smells he seems to conjure.
All this seems to me oddly ancient and familiar, perhaps because everything is repeated and re- stated, and the impression is of similar moods, faces and places in all sorts of times, films and stories. In fact, Ray's India must be the most familiar unknown place that filmgoers who have never seen it feel they know. Even the Paris of those atmospheric 'thirties or the beloved film- goers' West isn't part of one's half-forgotten, unforgettable memories like Ray's unfactual, un- documented country. Music and endless river, animal and garden swing, delicate Indian gait, mud, umbrellas, intricate decoration, huge plain landscapes, faces—all have a kind of hallucina- tory, hypnotic effect.
Hypnosis works both ways, of course, and although an artist is supposed to be able to intro-
duce a bore into a novel without being boring or paint a vulgarian without vulgarity, it is almost impossible to go as slowly as Ray, with as little action and as much sleep-inducing paraphernalia of sounds and images, without lulling your audience into a pleasurably somnolent state. An audience coming out of a film of Ray's (a good film of Ray's, that is—for there are bad ones, though no one seems to remember) has the sleepy, satisfied air of people coming home from a picnic on a still evening: it was unforgettably beautiful, it was as slow as the sun's movement, soon they won't remember what happened, but images and, above all, atmosphere will linger.
Charulata shows Ray at his best, understating, atmospheric, slow to the point where you almost lose track of the action, in the usual sense of the word, full of tender observations of things like an old man walking past a window or a pair of young women playing cards through an eternal, shadowy afternoon. But this time, be- cause it suits him and he suits the pace, one is not impatient with his stillness and slowness: all seems just as it should be. The time is the 1880s, the place the household of a rich bour-, geois couple, the husband a newspaper owner, the wife a decorative literary lady, longing for self-expression and—something. Her husband, who is rather what used to be called a `man's man,' which means busy and unnoticing, has tl large square beard, spatters his talk with English, and pats his wife's hand now and then, Ills thoughts elsewhere. Bored to distraction with having nothing to do, she embroiders him a pail, of slippers. 'Why, however did you find the timel he asks. A young man comes to stay, a literary fellow who writes flowery essays and, ems' crossed with sunshine beside the swing,
flirts gently with the inevitably responsive wife.
Of all this I am sure one is missing or mis- judging a large slice by not understanding the language and relying on brief subtitles to conveY all sorts of subtleties of expression. I once saW. a film of Ray's with an almost all-Indian audi- ence and realised that my sleepy reaction to the sight of his world was clearly inadequate, fc)., there was an audience for once not the least hi` sleepy and reacting with laughter and exclarne.: tions and the whole responsive tizzy of uncle' standing and complicity in places where I stl nothing but lips moving and a sentence of print that meant little. Much is said about Ray's unl, s versality and little about what his charactecd actually say in their tragi-comic encounters; an
I have a feeling that if we only knew with any sort of real understanding we would stop being lulled into agreeable slumbers and react far more sharply, with amusement and pain, to what happened.
'Almost a love-story,' say the posters for The Collector, which in admen's language means Frustration Can Be as Explosive as Fulfilment. The cinema's way of having its cake and eating it is to get a celebratedly handsome pair to- gether, make them somehow 'impossible' for each other, suggest that one is unattractive (which he plainly isn't), and throw up a non-event of violent suggestiveness—it may be a nun and a drunken sailor, a cool capitalist and a hot com- missar, the permutations are clearly endless. In William Wyler's The Collector that handsome pair Samantha Eggar and Terence Stamp are thrown together for weeks in a cellar. He kidnaps her, keeps her in the cellar, hopes to make her love him. Whether she does or doesn't makes the film's intriguingness, and Wyler is nothing if not intriguing. But the film needed a local director. Here was obviously a case for fidelity in the choice of objects—a convincing house above all. Wyler puts such a high shine on his murky story that it instantly becomes conventional (though fun, for a wet afternoon).
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