Ray, The Anthology on Netflix, Angers the Enthusiast and Would Have Ashamed The Master

Ray made me feel a hell lot of things. But most of all, it made me angry. Not sad. Not disappointed. Not defeated. Just angry. And rather cheated. 2021 is a terrible year as well as one which is nothing short of a benchmark for cinema. On 2 May 2021, we commenced the year-long Birth Centenary celebrations of Satyajit Ray, the ultimate movie master of Indian cinema and most certainly, of the world. He hit the road with a song on everyday struggles of human life, progressed to make compelling narratives questioning religion and politics come to life, derived a sense of history and heritage and let viewers see the real India through an utterly transparent gaze. His feminist, revisionist spirit gave him films like Charulata, Mahanagar, Devi and various female arcs for his other very popular works. 

I won't call Ray a visionary. He was a vision that Mother India, or whatever you choose to call this nation of ours, wanted us to see and concieve art with. After his death in 1992 though, or subsequently since he made his first film Pather Panchali, what is the state of Indian cinema in 2021? How are we paying the tribute to Manik-Da? No prizes for guessing- we are only revisiting him at his finest. We're still consuming the worlds of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, relishing the twisted pleasures of Jalsaghar, walking through the forests of Aranyer Din Ratri and of course, tearing up over The Apu Trilogy. This is because, to put it simply, not a single director has lived up to this humongous legacy. We can't call anyone the next Ray. Don't start at me by saying that there are amazing directors all over the country or reiterating that Hindi cinema is not the only cinema or that Malayalam cinema is the best cinematic industry working today in India. 

The great artists and their contemporary works are beautiful because they either choose to embrace the world around them with gritty realism or get influenced by the majorly superior industries around them. Not inspired, but influenced. They are great films no doubt, but they do rework. The auteurs in the times like ours debut and extract a signature style to throw them in their variously 'good' films, 'competent' films. The subtlety and nuance of Ray is completely lost in the mirage of superiority. As for Malayalam cinema, it's doing some greatly original work but the best I've seen is plot-and-treatment centric solidity which stays but it's still not entirely true to the Ray legacy (not necessarily a bad thing, just an observation). 

Having said that, I won't lie that the idea of a Netflix anthology called Ray came to me as a pleasant surprise. And why not? It explored an entirely other side of Ray- the storyteller. Of course, cinema is a way in which he told his stories. But he was also a soldier of the pen. In the last decades of his life, we see him shifting a creative focus to stories which he used to pen. Short, crisp tales written in Bengali, with simplistic language but layered characters and nuance constructed with minimalistic entertainment. His political firmness reflected even through his detective mysteries and children's content. It was genuinely fascinating as an idea that Hindi cinema, which was a subject of open criticism for Manik-Da and quite distant to him with only two major Hindi films (A feature film named The Chess Players based on a short story by Munshi Premchand and a TV movie called Sadgati which was also by Premchand). 

This is not the first time a Ray short story has been turned into a (Hindi) short film though. It happened back in 2013 when an anthology named Bombay Talkies was made to celebrate the centenary of Hindi cinema. In the anthology, Dibakar Banerjee had made a film name Putul Kumar Filmstar, which was based on a Satyajit Ray short story of the same name about a poor theatre artist's descent into fame. The short starred Nawazuddin Siddiquie, the setting was Mumbai and not Kolkata and the ending was fixed. It was an excellent short because its liberties with the original only make it better and its simplicity of an ode to cinema was quietly penetrating, powerful and emotional. Do shorts of this anthology live up?

The assortment of filmmakers is quite brief. It's nothing as vibrant and 'different' as the quartet of Karan Johar, Zoya Akhter, Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap. Nor is it as unfamiliar as the recent likes of Unpaused (on Amazon Prime) and Ajeeb Daastaans (Also on Netflix). Plainly and simply, it was thrilling. We have two shorts by Srijit Mukherjee (who is criticized as Dawdaw among Bengali cinema enthusiasts). Srijit Da's works are all adorned with irritating edginess, unconventional storytelling that goes too far and not in a great way, and at times relentless devotion to mediocrity. I think except Ek Je Chhilo Raja (2018), a film based on the true story of Bhawal Maharaja of the present Bangladesh, none of his films have truly aged well. He gets the first two places though, and I started watching them half-heartedly and with a doubt on my mind. However, as the second and last short film Bahrupiya came to an end I concluded my viewing experience with a doubt of whether he's going to survive even in a queue of those stale, ignorant "National-Award winning" directors?

We are not here for analyzing an incompetent director's mess. Anyways, there's always some room for improvement. And so, we have our third short story by the incredibly talented Abhishek Chaubey. Chaubey is an earthy storyteller- the lingo in his work is rustic, the settings and characters belong to their rooted surroundings, abrupt with delicious crimes and black comedic stretches. If you think he's a product of the Gangs of Wasseypur impact, hold your horses because his debut film Ishqiyaa released before 2011 and was as rooted as it could be. His subsequent films Dedh Ishqiya (one of the finest Hindi and Indian films or the decade), Udta Punjab (one of the strongest 2016 films), and Sonchiriya (the best theatrical release of the pre-Coronavirus India) were incredibly different from the other gritty films made in Hindi cinema. While his segment Hungama Kyon Hai Barpa is not as astonishing as some of the moments in these features, it's an incredibly fascinating short which is well-acted by its two superb actors and two even better cameo artists. The cinematography and superfluous writing based in the Agra-Lucknow belt is fantastic and the world-building was reminiscent of Ray's Shatranj Ke Khiladi, his marvelous Hindi debut. 

Mediocrity does come to play its second innings though. Vaasan Baala, the director of Cannes-selected Peddlers and Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, crafts Spotlight in an edgy syntax complete with obvious references to Satyajit Ray's filmography and a less-than-promising ensemble where only Radhika Madaan and Rajeev Masand take the spotlight. However, even though I'm not a fan of storytelling which proposes flavourless messaging, I quite liked how intelligently it equipped the entire narrative without crushing it under its own weight.

The end-notes are placed right for the better part, but I'll still stick to my statement that the film made me angry. It certainly adapts the visual language of Ray (that too, in momentary instances) and recalls the master while adapting him. But even at its strongest it bleaches out the spirit of realist, minimalist, universally socialist storytelling of the master. The mysteries are placed above their humanism (especially in Srijit's works) and of course, the focus almost entirely shifts on the acting which is much unlike Ray's films. These performances are so incredibly elevated that they sometimes stand above the films. The good moments, and that one film which stands out, are pretty enjoyable but the bad ones do leave a slapping taste. The master is ashamed and proven right. We have an unsophisticated taste at the movies.