At Aranyer Din Ratri’s Cannes’ premiere, Sharmila Tagore says, ‘I, Simi Garewal are the only survivors’

“Simi and I are the only survivors, everyone else has passed on,” said Sharmila, including the very handsome Soumitra Chatterjee, who made stylish dark glasses such a statement, as one of the four young men who fetch up in a forest guest house, for a short break away from their citified, stratified lives.

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In Ray’s hands, the story turns into something astonishing, where what we see is what we get, and much more: it is an allegory and a sharp comment, a jungle safari and slumming-it, and coming of age, all wrapped in his deceptively simple style, where everything comes together so beautifully, that you cannot imagine anyone else playing ‘antakshri’ in the forest again.

The film has come to life again, with the help of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation. It took six years worth of co-ordination between the various stakeholders, the families of the director and the producers, who were kept in the loop at all stages. It also has fresh subtitles.

Wes Anderson, who is in Cannes competition with his ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ was in attendance, fanboy personified, as he spoke of his well-known admiration for Satyajit Ray’s work, and how he has happily ‘stolen’ from the music of the film. Instrumental in kickstarting the restoration about six years ago, Anderson’s short but fulsome speech, calling Aranyer Din Ratri as one of the best in Ray’s pantheon, was followed by both Sharmila (who disarmed the former completely by asking, “May I call you Wes”) and Simi in nostalgia mode.

“Exactly 56 years ago on this date, we were all in the forest, with no electricity, no loos, no phones, no communication,” said Simi Garewal, who plays a tribal girl in the film, so different from the roles she had done in the past, and would go on to do. She added, “But it didn’t matter because we were all in a state of heightened euphoria, and I had the honour of working with one of the greatest directors in the world.”

 

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“Films fade, as do memories. The film has not only been restored, but made immortal,” she said. So aptly put, for a film which spoke to its time in the way it looked at the differences of rural and urban living, of value systems under threat, of a startling modern take on relationships between men and women. It is also a film that has remained supremely ageless.