Nayak (The Hero)

Nayak (1966) is an important film directed by the great Satyajit Ray.  Produced in Bengali, the characters actually speak in English about a third of the time -- although subtitles are necessary to decipher what is said.  The picture features impressive performances by two mainstays of Bengali cinema, Uttam Kumar, a Bollywood matinee idol, and the radiant Sharmita Tagore.  Although the picture is tightly constrained --it takes place almost entirely on a crowded train -- Ray's scenario is far-ranging, often very funny, and explores the relationship between life, truth, and the cinema. 

Arindam Mukherjee (Kumar) is a movie star who must travel from Calcutta to New Delhi -- he's procrastinated and so has to take the train, a trip that seems to last about 24 hours.   The movie is overtly modeled on Fellini's 1964 8 1/2 -- in fact as commentators note, Kumar wears dark glasses and look more than a little like Marcello Mastrioanni.  (A deeper, more subterranean, source for the film is Bergman's Wild Strawberries.)  On the train, the hero (Nayak) encounters a number of people.  This encounters trigger reveries and nightmares -- he rummages among his memories and we see flashbacks relating to key moments in his life.  A young woman, Miss Sangupta (Sharmita Tagore), who edits a magazine for "modern women", also takes the opportunity (their enforced proximity) to interview the hero -- he becomes increasingly candid with her and, in fact, confesses sins that might damage his public reputation.  At the end of the film, Miss Sangupta tears up her interview notes, resolving not to publish anything about the hero.  She departs the train to relative obscurity; Mukherjee leaves surrounded by the Press and adoring fans.  Encyclopedic in its scope, the film offers a cross-section of Indian society, politics, and the arts in 1966, deploying a number of subplots to make its points. 

Mukherjee has been in the press two days before his trip, implicated in brawl in a bar.  We don't know exactly what happened but there is a sense that the hero is suffering some kind of emotional crisis.  At his home, we see him surrounded by taciturn servants and babbling sycophants, incapable of communicating in any meaningful way with him.  On the train, he is lodged in a sleeper car with an extended family -- the little girl, who clearly adores him, is feverish:  in the course of the film, Mukherjee seems to heal her.  The men all studiously ignore Mukherjee but the women on the train are openly fans and they press him for autographs.  His fame is such that when the train stops at a station, the window in the diner car where he is meeting with Miss Sangupta is thronged with skinny, ragged and poor-looking men who tap at the glass like half-crazed zombies.  Miss Sangupta, who is riding in the less comfortable "chair car" -- that is, without the beds in the sleeper -- is bold:  she wears horn-rim glasses and is thoroughly modern and she accosts the movie star, pretending not to be impressed by him.  (She's like Debbie Reynolds with Gene Kelly during their first encounter in Singin' in the Rain.)  The hero is intrigued by her and agrees to be interviewed.  In the course of the interview, and the hero's dreams and reveries, we learn that Mukherjee began his career as a politically engaged performer in village plays.  He feels that he has compromised his principles by abandoning this humble format for political discourse by becoming a matinee idol.  (In one dream, he sees his old theater director covered with ash and physically crumbling:  one important scene takes place at the ghat or cremation pyre of this man who was his mentor.  In another dream, he imagines himself literally drowning in cash.)  In flashbacks, we see him seducing a young married woman who wants to be in films and refusing to speak at a place where a group of hapless industrial workers have been on strike for 24 days -- in fact, he literally flees this political confrontation.  There are several intriguing subplots:  an advertising man tries to prostitute his younger wife to secure an important client and, later, a fat guru hires the advertising man's agency to publicize his transcendental mediation ashram.  Echoing Fellini, we see a beautiful small girl twice who seems to represent the hero's lost innocence.  As the film proceeds, the hero becomes increasingly dismayed at the compromises that he has made and recalling times when he betrayed his earlier idealistic principles.  He gets flamboyantly drunk and stands at an open door on the train watching the gleaming tracks parallel to the train criss-crossing -- it seems as if he is contemplating suicide.  Then, Miss Sangupta appears, without her glasses, spectacularly beautiful and merciful, "cow-eyed" like a Goddess.  (Sharmita Tagore acted first with Ray when she was 13 in the Apu trilogy; she is one of those transcendentally gifted actresses who can appear completely normal and, even, homely in some scenes, the very embodiment of the modern woman, and, then, imbued with a sort of divine radiance -- one recalls that she is probably most famous for Ray's Devi, playing the village girl who is destroyed when the villagers perceive her to be a reincarnation of the goddess Devi.  Miss Sangupta shows mercy to the hero and, perhaps, saves him.  In the final sequence, she departs the train filmed in grainy 16 mm or, even, 8 mm film stock, the camera handheld and very unsteady as it follows her walking through the vast anonymous crowds in the New Delhi train station; after cutting from her, the camera, then, moves into a glossy 35 milimeter close-up of the movie star, a shot professionally made and rock-steady -- people put flowers around his neck and he is thronged by reporters. 

There are many things in this move and a summary does not do the film justice.  Several viewings will probably be required to "tease out" the relationship between the parts -- there is a scarf-shrouded old critic, for instance, who denounces actors as corrupt (the last film he saw was in 1942 How Green was my Valley).  Curiously, this exponent of the aesthetics of old India always speaks in English.  One sequence, a memory of a film shoot, contrasts different acting styles and there are political subcurrents that I don't pretend to understand.  The film is welded together impressively and the viewer can perceive cunning parallels between the different kinds of moral, ethical and business compromises that the characters make.  Uttam Kumar is particularly effective as the tormented movie star -- he was a major figure in Bollywood and has a saturnine presence a bit like Steve McQueen.  Criterion has restored the film beautifully and it is highly recommended.