As filmmaking goes, I think this as fine a movie as any by Satyajit Ray that I've seen. Narratively, it is a bit clumsy at times because here Ray seems the most blatantly to be striving to be western. Some of the resulting dialogue and characterizations are uncharacteristically ham-fisted.
Set largely on a train, Ray and DP Subrata Mitra make wonderful and unique use of windows to make this chamber saga seem expansive. One rarely sees soft-focus utilized to reveal landscapes, but the filmmakers do just that here to great affect. The Indian countryside cohabitates in the luminous close-ups of stars Uttam Kumar and Sharmilia Tagore.
A character study of a spoiled Bollywood star, this film, more than any others of Ray's that I've seen, reveals him as a great admirer of then contemporary European cinema. Clearly, Ray had been watching La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 very attentively in the years before making this film. For Nayak could fairly be described as an attempt to make a Fellini movie in India. The result is one of the few Ray films to seem derivative, and at times pretentious. There are unnecessary references to Freud, and indeed, much forced Freudian psychologizing in the character study. One senses in this work a troubling desire by its auteur to achieve "white approval".
Another possible source of inspiration for Nayak is some of the meta-cinematic work of the early French New Wave. This influence Ray displays with more grace, putting the mirror on the cinematic medium in his own way. The actor-protagonist played by Kumar is told by many other characters over the course of the film that movie acting can never be real acting, that the actor in cinema is but a prop. One senses that Ray was challenging Kumar to prove these assertions wrong, and Kumar certainly answers the challenge.
Set largely on a train, Ray and DP Subrata Mitra make wonderful and unique use of windows to make this chamber saga seem expansive. One rarely sees soft-focus utilized to reveal landscapes, but the filmmakers do just that here to great affect. The Indian countryside cohabitates in the luminous close-ups of stars Uttam Kumar and Sharmilia Tagore.
A character study of a spoiled Bollywood star, this film, more than any others of Ray's that I've seen, reveals him as a great admirer of then contemporary European cinema. Clearly, Ray had been watching La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 very attentively in the years before making this film. For Nayak could fairly be described as an attempt to make a Fellini movie in India. The result is one of the few Ray films to seem derivative, and at times pretentious. There are unnecessary references to Freud, and indeed, much forced Freudian psychologizing in the character study. One senses in this work a troubling desire by its auteur to achieve "white approval".
Another possible source of inspiration for Nayak is some of the meta-cinematic work of the early French New Wave. This influence Ray displays with more grace, putting the mirror on the cinematic medium in his own way. The actor-protagonist played by Kumar is told by many other characters over the course of the film that movie acting can never be real acting, that the actor in cinema is but a prop. One senses that Ray was challenging Kumar to prove these assertions wrong, and Kumar certainly answers the challenge.