This Film On

The Music Room

It's no surprise that Satyajit Ray's The Music Room is based on a short story (Tarasankar Banerji's "Jalsaghar"), since the film retains a literary quality. Still, Ray applies his own cinematic imagination to expanding upon his source, resulting in a surprisingly sympathetic elegy for the feudal class, or at least one of its sad representatives (The Music Room was a mid-Apu Trilogy project that allowed Ray to stretch his muscles in a new direction). In a commanding, haunting turn, stage-trained Chhabi Biswas plays Biswambhar Roy, a feudal landlord obsessed with keeping up with the Khans.

Roy's fortune has dwindled to almost nothing, but he lives in denial. When the film opens, he is keeping up appearances by selling off his wife's jewelry. The money invariably goes to fund music-listening parties with food, drink, and the latest, greatest musicians. Roy's relationship to the music is an obsessive love, likened to an addiction. As with a drug, there is a falloff of pleasure over time, and the same can be said for Roy's prideful addiction to the esteem in which he is accustomed to being held. Petty and competitive, he cannot stand the thought of a rival—namely his boastful but comically solicitous neighbor Ganguli (Gangapada Basu)—hosting a better concert. (The film's showcase music scenes include performances by Begum Akhtar, Roshan Kumari, Ustad Waheed Khan, and Bismillah Khan.)

Ray paints the tale in clean, broad, confident strokes, and the photography demonstrates Ray's sure sense of composition and camera movement. The desolate surroundings of Roy's deteriorating palace set a perfect stage for this phantom, not of opera but of khyal, thumri and kathak. Though the story ostensibly concerns Roy's increasingly isolating obsession with his music room, the deep-running still waters of the story are in the threat Roy's driven distraction poses to his relationships with his wife (Padma Devi) and son (Pinaki Sen Gupta), whose presence he nominally values but tragically takes for granted. The film's most memorable scene may be the visibly aged Roy's latter-day return to his now-unkempt music room, with its painted portraits framing a mirror that mockingly reflects its owner's failure to see what mattered most in life. The notion of lost legacy informs the film's distraught last word: "blood."