Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard both use similar visual motifs to communicate the decay of body and spirit with their principal characters. We see their homes, those of Charles Foster Kane and Norma Desmond, looking abandoned and in utter disrepair. The pools are empty, the grounds are unkempt and overgrown, and the owners are either at death’s doorstep (Kane) or living on the brink of complete irrelevance. The images are beautiful and surreal and effortlessly communicate the idea of two once powerful people now living in quiet anonymity. In The Music Room (1958), directed by Satyajit Ray and available on The Criterion Channel of FilmStruck, the idea is similar but the motifs are different. The house and its surroundings have the same sense of abandonment but the focus is not on the real estate but on the central character, sitting in a chair, motionless and quiet. As his servant approaches, he asks “What month is it?” What month. Not the time, or the day, or even the week but the month. That’s how completely out of touch he is with the world around him. He’s not dead but he may as well be.
The man in the chair is Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas) and he was once the lord of a grand estate. The estate is still present but the grandeur is long gone. The only thing that moves his spirit is music he hears from an unknown source. He is told by his servant that it is the music of his neighbor celebrating the initiation of his son. The neighbor is Mahim Ganguly (Gangapada Basu) and represents new money. His wealth was not passed down to him but earned through business skills and hard work. Biswambhar looks down on him, naturally, as the caste system would inform him that he, Biswambhar, was of a higher and more important social class, even if he now lives among the ruins of misspent life. He begins to think back on his own son’s initiation and through a series of flashbacks, we understand how he arrived at the sad destination of his present life.
For Biswambhar, the illusion of power and wealth is far more important than actually having the power and wealth. Of course, it would be wonderful if the two coincided but if the real wealth and power are not there, he would much rather pretend they are than accept the truth that they are not. As we watch through each successive flashback, in which he eschews responsibility and planning for the future in exchange for celebration and fantasy in the present, we realize that his love of opulence, personified by his music room, the grand hall he shows off with each concert he holds, is all that matters to him.
Unlike Charles Foster Kane, who famously acknowledges that he can lose a million dollars a year for the next sixty years before arriving at financial straits, Biswambhar has no such luxury of time. In some ways, his story is what Kane’s would have been if he’d only had a few years of wealth and power and then it all disappeared. In other ways, it’s like Norma Desmond. He still holds on to what he has, dilapidated as it is, as if it’s all still existing in a glorious past.
Satyajit Ray uses setting as much as Welles and Wilder to convey the idea of isolation but makes it seem more remote, ringing more hollow and empty than Xanadu or the Desmond residence on Sunset Boulevard. And unlike the constructed sets of the Kane and Desmond homes, Ray shot at an old palace in Nimtita in Bengal, an area surrounded by dried out river plains that makes the palace seem like an island in the middle of an ocean now dried up, leaving it inaccessible. Not only that, but the fog surrounding it makes it seem as if there is nothing beyond the palace at all. Calling something “other-worldly” in a movie probably means next to nothing these days, considering how many times it’s been said, but it really does apply here. The setting may have been Nimtita but it looks like a world all its own.
The music by Vilayat Khan, works perfectly to construct a grandiose past in the mind of beleaguered present. Ray later said he thought the music was too celebratory and upbeat and that he would have made it more solemn and sad, to counter the opulence onscreen but the sanguine nature of the music composed by Khan makes the point better. It’s a credit to Ray that he didn’t ask it to be changed when it didn’t match what he had in mind.
Satyajit Ray is probably most famous to film fans for The Apu Trilogy (also available on The Criterion Channel of FilmStruck) than anything else but his career was vast and varied. The Music Room doesn’t have the same immediate recognition of those other works but remains one of his best films, period. And it’s one of the best reflections on self-delusion and regret the cinema has to offer.
Greg Ferrara