A group of four young men from Kolkata pack into a vehicle and travel hundreds of miles into the forests of Palamu district, searching for a remedy. Days And Nights In The Forest watches them as they attempt to break free from their city lives and find something more significant — mending a broken heart, easing the relentless competition, or merely demonstrating that they possess enough intelligence to count.
This journey turns out to be a trap for the men who take it. They come with their egos, their sexual desires, and their fixed ideas about the people they meet along the way. One by one, the film watches each man fail to see what he has really walked into.
Four Men, One Road
The quartet splits into distinct types. Hari, played by Samit Bhanja, is the cricket meathead. Ashim, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, is the rising big shot, already thinking about the next step up. Sanjoy, played by Subhendu Chatterjee, is the cowardly intellectual, dressed up in ideas he doesn’t fully understand. Then there’s Shekhar, played by Rabi Ghosh, the squirrelly comic relief — a balding Joe Pesci figure who is perpetually broke but always ready to joke.
They arrive at a rented government bungalow and immediately set a rule: no shaving for the rest of the trip. They call it real bachelor living. The rule fails almost instantly. A single night of drinking a powerful local drink sends the bored group hunting for women.
The Women They Find
A poor man dragged from the roadside serves as their guide to two women from elsewhere: Aparna, portrayed by Sharmila Tagore, and her widowed sister-in-law Jaya, played by Kaberi Bose. These women are composed, steady, and plainly accustomed to enduring men. At first they set apart themselves from the local Indigenous Santhal women, such as Duli, played by Simi Garewal, who Hari desires. Yet before long it becomes plain that the two women share much — namely, a shared need to endure men.
The movie does an outstanding job of capturing the friction between the men and the women. When the men attempt to impress and seduce them, their middle-manager tyrannies and yuppie cruelties become visible under the sun. Their frailty and vulnerability spill out, much like a tourist’s giveaway sign in front of a local. This creates prickly strain throughout all their exchanges — including a charged scene between Jaya and Sanjoy, which gains a boldly sexual quality.
Most open and sincere expressions occur primarily among the men, particularly after dark and once several drinks have been consumed. Days And Nights In The Forest excels as drunken cinema, with the camera moving between their faces seated together at the barroom table before shifting to their blackout revelries on a dirt road in the dark. It all reaches its peak at a raucous village carnival. A sequence where they’re caught outside bathing, are no less embarrassing than their more pretentious foibles, but at least they’re exposed stands out.
The Memory Game
A key part of the movie is a drawn-out memory contest — where men and women sit around a picnic blanket taking turns to add to a long list of well-known names. It grows into a nerve-racking contest of wills and a layered test of who can appear the most refined. Aparna and Ashim fight it out as the last pair standing, arguing over which Kennedy they mean and throwing out the names of great writers and Communist leaders. How the contest ends speaks just as much to their characters as the bold display of knowledge during the game itself.
It’s a hypnotic moment familiar to anyone who’s secreted invisible flirtations inside an icebreaker. Wes Anderson paid direct homage to it in Asteroid City, a film he called “a clash/negotiation between castes and sexes” that’s about “selfish men and their hopes and cruelties and spectacular lack of wisdom” and the “women who see through them.”
What Ray Actually Says
The compressed experience of several days spent in a cabin carries the grace of a fine short story — and the film draws from Sunil Ganguly’s novel — and an eye for human behavior that can see the great meanings roiling underneath everyday activities. Days And Nights In The Forest, though it is not merely a Deliverance-style tale about condescending urbanites being brought low, nor does it stand as a pure feminist work aimed at exposing the universal male ego. Both elements appear within Ray’s film: it scolds and attacks the men for their shared callousness, yet allows them to escape the consequences of the very flawed entitlements common to well-enough-off men who run wild in a patriarchy.
The criticism doesn’t attempt much subtlety, yet it makes its points more clearly than most other films about ambitious young friends do, able to see both the big picture and the small details at once.
Comparing the Sequences
| Sequence | Role in the Film |
|---|---|
| Drunken scenes at night | Show the men’s weakness and vulnerability |
| Memory game | A tense battle of wills and a flirtation icebreaker |
| Village carnival | Where the trip’s consequences come to a head |
| Bathing sequence | Embarrassing, but genuinely vulnerable |
The Verdict
The film Days And Nights In The Forest takes on caste, sex, and class with a keen eye. Its targets are men who are mocked, yet never lose their sense of humanity. Even when the characters are at their worst, true bonds of feeling come through. A memory game holds the audience spellbound, and the scenes of drinking are excellent. The entire work moves with the exactness of a fine short story brought to the screen.
The film understands that self-destruction is often a choice — the men could stop at any moment, but they don’t. Instead, they keep pushing, keep prowling, keep trying to impress people who aren’t impressed. The women see through them.
See the video the story is built around at The A.V. Club.
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