Nayak (1966) - film review

Arindam Mukherjee, a major star of Bengali cinema, is invited to Delhi to receive a prestigious award for his work.  As it is too late to book a flight, he must take the train from Calcutta.  Arindam is not keen to make the journey but knows he must attend the awards ceremony for appearances’ sake.  His latest film has been written off as a flop and newspapers are filled with lurid accounts of a brawl he got himself into the day before.  On the train, Arindam is accosted by an attractive young woman, Aditi, who introduces herself as the editor of a serious women’s magazine.  Arindam intrigues Aditi and she prompts him into giving her an exclusive interview.  Initially standoffish and unwilling to say anything about himself, Arindam soon cannot help baring his soul.  He recalls events that have long haunted him - his mentor’s attempts to dissuade him from becoming a film actor, the humiliation of his first day’s shoot, his betrayal of a dear friend...  Aditi soon realises that she is privy to a side of the film star that he has carefully kept to himself.  In contrast to his self-confident, even arrogant, public persona, Arindam is in reality a solitary and deeply tormented soul...

Nayak (a.k.a. The Hero) is not one of Satyajit Ray’s better known films but it deserves to be considered one of his major achievements, both for the story it tells and also for the way in which Ray tells it, with masterful economy and startling sensitivity.  Although the director had been making films since the mid-1950s, this is only the second of his films with an original screenplay.  Apart from Kanchenjungha (1962), all of Ray’s previous films had been adaptations of literary works.

The casting of Uttam Kumar in the lead male role was both appropriate and inspired.  At the time, Kumar was Bengali cinema’s biggest film star, and there is a striking similarity between the actor and the character he is playing (something which must have been apparent to both Ray and Kumar at the time). Like the film’s main protagonist, Kumar was a national celebrity who sought refuge from the real world by working excessively hard.  (In fact, he worked himself into an early grave, dying from a stress-induced heart attack during a film shoot when he was just 55.)  In Nayak, Kumar delivers what is arguably his finest performances, a testament to his skill as an actor and an indication perhaps that he saw something of himself in the flawed and complex personality he was portraying.

Nayak is an atypical film for Ray because it focuses almost exclusively on one character and takes place almost entirely within one confined setting (the crowded compartments on a train).  This narrow focus gives the film a sustained dramatic intensity and a stifling sense of oppression which makes it both compelling and subtly disturbing.  The train journey as a metaphor for a man’s life is particularly appropriate for this film.  The image of the rushing train set on a course from which it is impossible to deviate is a visual representation of Arindam’s existential nightmare - his is a future without choice or hope.

What the film is about is the slow unravelling of a man’s carefully constructed persona to reveal the tortured individual that lies beneath.  The man who is described variously as a ’hero’ or a ’modern Krishna’ at the start of the film is ultimately exposed as a sad, pathetic wreck of a man who is trapped in a kind of parallel reality, unable to enjoy the simple pleasures of a normal life.  The woman he meets on the train and who takes pity on him might have ended up his wife and saviour had he not fashioned himself as a god.   In possibly the bleakest sequence of any Satyajit Ray film, our fallen hero appears ready to embrace death, his one final solace.  Although he is pulled back at the last moment, we see his ineluctable future trajectory mapped out before him like a stairway to Hell.  Those who climb the highest have the furthest to fall.

© James Travers 2010

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