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The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
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The Music Room (1958)
2xDVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 01:38:52 | 7,65 Gb + 7,58 Gb
Audio: Bengali AC3 1.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English | Cover + Booklet
Genre: Drama, Music | The Criterion Collection #573
2xDVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 01:38:52 | 7,65 Gb + 7,58 Gb
Audio: Bengali AC3 1.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English | Cover + Booklet
Genre: Drama, Music | The Criterion Collection #573
Director: Satyajit Ray
Stars: Chhabi Biswas, Sardar Akhtar, Gangapada Basu
With The Music Room (Jalsaghar), Satyajit Ray brilliantly evokes the crumbling opulence of the world of a fallen aristocrat (the beloved actor Chhabi Biswas) desperately clinging to a fading way of life. His greatest joy is the music room in which he has hosted lavish concerts over the years—now a shadow of its former vivid self. An incandescent depiction of the clash between tradition and modernity, and a showcase for some of India’s most popular musicians of the day, The Music Room is a defining work by the great Bengali filmmaker.
Satyajit Ray became internationally acclaimed with his first two features, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, which owed much to the traditions of documentary, poetic realism and the Italian Neo-realists. His fourth feature, The Music Room (1959), marks a significant and important step in his career. Following the critical and popular failure of the comedy The Philosopher's Stone, The Music Room showed the world that Ray had great range and talent beyond the naturalism of his first films. Ray takes a classical approach, informed by the masters on international cinema that he revered, for this drama set in the fading decadence of old-world feudal life of the 1920. Pather Panchali is a work of social observation with a director in sympathy with the plight of the characters. The Music Room offers a more complicated attitude toward its main character and to the changing world in which he lives. His portrait of the aristocracy, with its wealth and rituals and sense of social superiority and entitlement, increasing impotent and irrelevant in an India moving toward modernity, was his most accomplished film up that time and many critics still hold it as the director's masterpiece.![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/57/7d/001e7d57_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]]()
Chhabi Biswas, a popular and respected actor of his day, plays Biswambhar Roy, once a powerful feudal lord, or zamindar, now a threadbare remnant of the old world. The opening scenes present him alone in his crumbling palace, sucking on his hookah like a pacifier, looking out over the ruins of his one mighty lands as the modern world passes him by. The sounds of a concert from a neighbor's estate sends him back to a time when his wife and son lived and he spent lavishly on recitals and celebrations. His great love is music and he considers himself a connoisseur and a patron of the arts, indulging in his hobby to the neglect of his fortune and his lands, which are slowly being swallowed up by the river. It's also a matter of social currency and vanity. To be a lover of music is not enough. Roy must be seen to be a true connoisseur with a public show of patronage and a subtle mastery of the art of presenting a master artist in his private music room.![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/58/7d/001e7d58_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]]()
As presented by Ray and Biswas, Roy is vain and impotent, a remnant of a culture of refinement and respect more concerned with social stature and aesthetic pleasure than such grubby concerns as business or work, and his vanity and ego are ultimately the cause of his fall into isolation and irrelevance. Yet the film has is a grudging affection for Roy, who though foolish is a loving husband and father, and his loss is offered as both punishment for his narcissism and tragic comeuppance for a man too invested in his social superiority to learn from it. He's also a man invested in old-world signs and portents–a cricket drowning in a glass of wine, a spider crawling across his portrait–which director Ray uses for dramatic effect and metaphor. When the candles of Roy's chandelier slowly go out at the end of the long night, he watches in panic as if the stars are all flickering out. It is a beautiful metaphor, evocative and rich with multiple meanings: Roy sees it as a sign of his mortality and impending death while the director uses it as an illustration of the man's superstitions, a metaphor for the end of his influence and a signal that his time is at an end, as well as the simple measure of time: the night is over and the dawn is breaking.![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/59/7d/001e7d59_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]]()
In contrast to the arrogant grace of Roy is the merchant Ganguly (Gangapada Basu), the son of a village moneylender who has become a successful businessman. This garish nouveau riche character, a music lover himself, gracelessly flaunts his fortune while courting the approval of Roy, still the symbolic elder of the social world. When Ganguly buys a local manor and launches his own concerts and celebrations, Roy takes it as a challenge to his status and to his very world. Next to the lone champion horse and an elephant grazing in the fields, all that's left of Roy's once mighty stable of status symbols, Ganguly has a motorcar and a generator bringing electricity his home (the chugging of the motor intrudes upon the serenity of Roy's evenings on his terrace). The clownish Ganguly is a powerful man with a crude manner that affronts Roy's sense of dignity. Ray clearly feels some sympathy for his threadbare aristocrat's sense of propriety even as he condemns the emptiness of his achievement. The music room becomes a battlefield for Roy's final display of social superiority, a perfectly staged show of old-world manners and rituals that come at such a cost as to make it meaningless.![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5a/7d/001e7d5a_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]]()
Though music played a central role in his first films, which were memorably scored by Ravi Shankar, The Music Room was Ray's first film to incorporate music and dance into the narrative of his films. In a way it is his response to the conventions of popular Indian cinema, which used song and dance numbers as interludes and spectacle. The three performances showcased here are recitals presented by Roy in his lavish music room, and are both part of the drama and apart from it, a preservation of the classical arts rather than a piece of pop entertainment, and a calculated show of Roy's rarified taste and refinement. Though we have seen him practicing the sitar and listening to music on his own, his smile and dreamy nods of appreciation appear to be more of a show for his audience than a spontaneous response to the music. In these performances, Roy's entrance and behavior is very much a part of the program.![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5b/7d/001e7d5b_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
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Criterion presents the DVD debut The Music Room, mastered from the 1995 restoration. Before the restoration project was begun, there had been no effort to properly preserve Ray's early work and this restoration, based on a 35mm fine-grain print made directly from the original negative, exhibits some scratches and scuffing at the reel ends but is otherwise in fine shape, with rich gradations of black and white and sharp imagery. The restored soundtrack has varying levels of hiss and noise, likely a remnant of the original production sound.
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/57/7d/001e7d57.jpeg)
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/58/7d/001e7d58.jpeg)
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/59/7d/001e7d59.jpeg)
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5a/7d/001e7d5a.jpeg)
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5b/7d/001e7d5b.jpeg)
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5c/7d/001e7d5c_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5c/7d/001e7d5c.jpeg)
The great director from India, with an international reputation, Satyajit Ray ("Pather Panchali"/"Charulata"/"The Chess Players"), bases his poignant, austere film, that depicts a clash between tradition and the modern ways, on a short story by Tarashankar Banerjee. It's set in the late 1920s, in a rural area where the protagonist is an aging feudal landlord, Biswambhar Roy (Chabi Biswas, one of India's greatest actors), who lives in a crumbling palace and is an idler puffing on his hookah while seated on his roof attended by his aging servant Ananta (Kali Sarkar) and not doing a thing about his dwindling ancestral wealth that was squandered away over the years because of his foolish extravagances.![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5d/7d/001e7d5d_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]]()
There are long flashbacks to a happier time when Roy was thrilled by his only son (Pinaki Sen Gupta) and was kept from becoming too foolish by his more practical-minded wife (Padma Devi), and of a time when he took pride in his music room–featuring a large, ornate, candlelit chandelier, that made attending a concert here special. In the music room Roy invited India's greatest musicians to perform for his noble guests. Roy now can't change his wasteful ways and clings to a life that's disappearing, and is conflicted by the success of his uncultured self-made neighbor, Mahim Ganguly (Gangapado Bose), a moneylender with social ambitions whose house is equipped with modern furniture and has a noisy generator for electricity that penetrates to his house and interferes with his concentration. It greatly annoys Roy that the upstart nouveau riche neighbor tries to use his money to gain the respect Roy inherited from a good birth.![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5e/7d/001e7d5e_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]]()
Sinking into a listless drug-induced fantasy world as he's slowly dying, the middle-aged Roy reviews his life and we see his downfall is caused by hubris, arrogance, lethargy, selfishness and hedonism. Becoming increasingly melancholic, Roy mourns the death of his wife and child in a boating accident four years ago during a thunderstorm and rekindles the better memories when he had political clout and the social scene revolved around him. This look inside at what Roy's thinking, leaves us with a sad and tragic figure who will not be able to hold onto for too much longer his privileged life as he chooses to bankrupt himself for one last glorious recital party in his cherished reopened music room with a great kathak dancer (Roshan Kumari).![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5f/7d/001e7d5f_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]]()
It's a remarkable film that's filled with outstanding Indian classical music and is hypnotic as a fable that might treat its aristocratic protagonist with respect, but has little sympathy for his plight. Ray's democratic social insights and his revealing close-up character study of such a useless antiquated person whose mind became darkened in his last days to a point where he lost control of his wits, after a brief moment of triumph, showing up his neighbor that he could still throw a great recital, is masterly done, as the filmmaker paints an ironic picture of a dying feudal era that should be remembered not only for its glory but for all its warts.Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5d/7d/001e7d5d.jpeg)
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/5e/7d/001e7d5e.jpeg)
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The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
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Special Features:
- New high-definition digital restoration
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- Satyajit Ray (1984), a feature documentary by Shyam Benegal that chronicles Ray’s career through interviews with the filmmaker, family photographs, and extensive clips from his films (2:04:12)
- New interviews with Satyajit Ray biographer Andrew Robinson - For the Love of Music (17:36) and filmmaker Mira Nair (15:44)
- Excerpt from a 1981 French roundtable discussion with Ray, film critic Michel Ciment, and director Claude Sautet (10:36)
- PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Philip Kemp, a 1963 essay by Ray on the film’s location, and a 1986 interview with the director about the film’s music
![The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/61/7d/001e7d61_medium.jpeg)
The Music Room (1958) [The Criterion Collection #573] [ReUp]
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