Nayak - truth is stranger than fiction

Sorry but I'm taking Uttam Kumar over George Clooney any day of the week. That's not in dispute, it's just a basic fact about that man pictured below. Look at him. If that isn't the most classically handsome man you've ever seen, I have nothing to say to you. I know for a fact that every Bengali dude wants to be him. Like a white dude swooning over Ryan Reynolds, it's only natural for any Bengali guy to have unclassified man-crush feelings for this beautiful man.

Bengali Patrick Bateman (I said what I said)

Sorry, I got lost in his eyes. Where was I? Yes, Nayak. In my opinion, the greatest Bengali film ever made and in my all-time top ten films list, Nayak is one of those strange, abject, almost hyperreal films that you get quite immediately enamoured by. There's a smoothness to its style that's hard to grasp at. There's performances that resemble reality far more starkly than it should. Most importantly however, is that there's a story that in its essence is unsparingly honest and relatable.

"Human nature's a funny business" - Aristotle.

Okay, he didn't say that. But I'm paraphrasing. It's hard to understand human nature in general, wrinkles and all. That's why we write books, draw paintings, create cinema: to unearth those subsurface emotions that we can't explain in any other way. It's especially difficult to understand the nature of another human, mostly because they often don't understand themselves. The rhetoric of 'why are we who we are?', has been a core tenet of good films since the very beginning. Nayak starts and ends at that famous precipice: attempting to answer the question, why?

Nayak follows Arindam Mukherjee, a universally admired film star from Kolkata in the 1960s, played by Uttam Kumar, a universally admired film star from Kolkata in the 1960s. At this point, I would ideally make a joke about how much of a stretch that must've been. But I'm not going to, just because of how amazing he is in this movie. Arindam's in a rush, heading to Delhi to get an award, and so he undertakes a train journey amidst which the audience follows him. In that time, unravels the deeper workings of a man so thoroughly insecure and vulnerable, you would be disparaged to dissociate between the actor and the character.

The fame that Arindam lives and breathes comes at a price: the price of his principles. It's a cost he's not sure he can pay, but a debt he must now suffer through everyday. The burden he's adopted is a gamble any of us might be offered: success and validation for a few fickle moments that haunt your every waking second. Ask yourself, is that a gamble you'd be willing to take.

The foil to Arindam's character, journalist Aditi Sengupta is played by Sharmila Tagore (the mother of Saif Ali Khan, for the uninitiated), who does an excellent job in poking and prodding Arindam's nerves to learn the truth about who he is. Not because she cares, but weirdly enough because she doesn't. Aditi's a pragmatist, sensible and unbothered by Arindam's cult of personality, who embraces progressive values as opposed to the primitive constructs society indulges in celebrating like the fame that our protagonist covets. She'd rather look at the man behind the mask, and to good effect too.

Glimpse of Us - Joji (c. 1965)

What begins as a marriage of convenience, in the form of an interview for Aditi's magazine, evolves into a deep discussion about Arindam's life and his decisions: why he became an actor, the shrouded questions about his past, and the regrets of lost relationships. In doing so, the movie asks the audience to reevaluate our perceptions of self and the untruths we surreptitiously rationalise our existence by.

In the train of thought (see what I did there), Arindam divulges the dark secrets behind his success that, if exposed would diminish his sense of self-worth in the public arena. For a man whose trade is people, the eternal punishment would be the derision of the very same people he works day and night to please. And so when the practical Aditi catches him out and wins the game by unmasking his truth, one would think the movie calls it a day. Grim, perhaps, but just nonetheless. But in the metaphorical journey that we witness, the transformation isn't unilateral.

In those trudging moments of sheer honesty, Arindam's empty vulnerabilities expose to her the fragilities of man so wrought with guilt and despair, that she pities him. In a strange form of group therapy, she recognises the sympathy he deserves and grants him the kindness of living in his vanity. Her character transforms too, and this time it's because she does care.

Excellent writing is just one of the things Satyajit Ray should be credited for. I should digress and mention just how insane it is that I've written ten of these weird review/discussion things and not one of them has remotely mentioned Ray. Even insofar as this one is concerned, I've taken so long to bring him up. As a representative of Bengali culture, this is a failing on my part and I'd like to officially apologise.

I don't have the credentials to comment on any aspect of Satyajit Ray's filmmaking. It's quite simply beyond me. I'm just not that guy. I can only but look on with swelling pride, childlike awe, and untempered amazement at the brilliance of his work. Case in point: Arindam's dream/nightmare sequence.

Cinematography is an art, and here's why:

The vision it takes to craft such a poignantly melancholic frame, and to film and capture it at the right moment, in the right light, at the right distance. It's technical expertise at its finest hour. From the dialogue and screenplay, to the setting, to the characters, the humour and even the music (which by the way, is completely Ray's on creation for most of his major films), Satyajit Ray's talent earns him the title of a national hero. Thus, rests a preserved copy of the original film roll for Nayak in the Academy Film Archive, where it rightly belongs.

It might behoove a casual viewer to notice, a lot of Satyajit Ray's films often take place in a train setting for at least a scene or two, sometimes more, and for Nayak, almost dominantly. Now might also be the time to come clean that I have stolen the general template of the train-journey symbolism, and analogously moulded it into the metaphorical 'narrative journey' idea that I mention in a few other reviews (like my Spider-Man: No Way Home review which you can find here). The impetus for the idea arose from the observation of train journeys being portrayed as a means to usually drive the plot or develop a character, a theme that is rooted in Ray's work.

Ray's legacy and skill as a filmmaker, the strength of Uttam Kumar and Sharmila Tagore's performances, and the simplicity of its premise make Nayak a wondrous tale of the human condition, that deserves a watch. I perhaps can't explain why this Ray film is better than his others, because they're literally all excellent but this one lands as a personal favourite (alongside Chiriyakhana, a whodunit to rule all other whodunit's, also starring Uttam Kumar). While you're at it, try not to blush when Uttam Kumar smiles at you.