Film Review
Outside India, Satyajit Ray is renowned as an auteur filmmaker of the
first rank, best known for his realist dramas, exemplified by his
Apu Trilogy. In his
native India, he is just as well known as a writer of detective and
science-fiction stories. His best known creation is Feluda, a
shrewd Sherlock Holmes-like sleuth whose exploits continue to be
popular with adults and children alike. In the 1970s, Ray adapted
two of his Feluda stories as films:
Sonar
Kella (1975), and
Joi Baba
Felunath (1979). Several other Feluda adventures have
subsequently found their way onto cinema and television screens,
courtesy of Ray's son, Sandip.
For those whose experience of Satyajit Ray is limited to his auteur
masterpieces,
Joi Baba Felunath
(a.k.a
The Elephant God) will
come as a surprise, and perhaps a pleasant one at that. Here, Ray
is not preoccupied with the subtle complexities of human experience,
the injustice of India's class system or the cruel ironies of
existence. Instead, he sets out merely to entertain his
audience with an intricately woven crime mystery which Arthur Conan
Doyle and Agatha Christie would both be proud to claim as their own.
Playing the hero Feluda is Satyajit Ray's long term collaborator
Soumitra Chatterjee, who made his film debut in Ray's
Apur
Sansa (1959) and subsequently blossomed into one of India's
finest screen actors. Chatterjee's Feluda is every bit as
charismatic and sharp-witted as Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes,
although Chatterjee only played the role twice (here and in Ray's
previous Feluda film). Complementing Chatterjee in this (arguably
the best) Feluda outing are two other fine actors, Santosh Dutta and
Utpal Dutt, who both give great value as, respectively, a comical
Watson-like sidekick and a sinister Moriarty-like villain.
Joi Baba Felunath may be a
lesser film compared with Ray's other great achievements but the
director nonetheless handles it with his characteristic finesse and
artistry. Some ingenious camerawork makes the location, the
holy city of Benaras (the setting of Ray's 1956 film
Aparajito), resemble
a complex maze, mirroring the
labyrinthine plot which Feluda soon finds himself caught up in, like a
latter-day Theseus. Borrowing a few tricks from Hitchcock, Ray
masterfully builds the suspense, but also takes time out for some
bizarre comic diversions. Tension and humour are wonderfully
married in the set-piece sequence in which Feluda confronts his
arch-nemesis and uncomfortably has to accept some unwelcome
hospitality, which includes watching his friend being terrorised by a
decrepit sword-thrower. Whilst the film is clearly not a
masterpiece, it is an enjoyable divertissement and serves to lend
another dimension to Ray's complex personality.
© James Travers 2010
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Satyajit Ray film:
Agantuk (1991)
Film Synopsis
Feluda, one of Calcutta's sharpest detectives, decides to take a
holiday in Benaras, the old holy town on the banks of the River Ganges.
He is accompanied by his cousin Topshe and his friend Lalmohan Ganguly,
a renowned writer. Feluda has barely had time to unpack his
suitcase when he is invited to the house of a wealthy Bengali family
and entrusted with the recovery of a stolen idol of the Elephant God,
Ganesha. The evening before the valuable heirloom went
missing, the family was visited by businessman Maganlal Meghraj, who
offered to buy it for a large sum of money. The owner's son
refused to sell, but by the next morning the idol had mysteriously
vanished. Feluda pays a personal call on Meghraj, who admits that
he bought the idol honestly from its owner. It is obvious that
Meghraj is lying, but if he doesn't have the idol, who does?
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.