ordinaryperson wrote:I’ve seen “The Music Room” twice now. The first time I watched it I thought it was boring and confusing. The second time I watched it I liked it a lot more... The first time I watched this (and even the second time) I was confused by the editing in the beginning.
Drucker wrote:I admit that I, too, found the quick jump into a flashback sequence confusing the first time I watched this film. Mainly because of how quickly it happens. But my second time, watching it last night, I found the film beautiful
Yes, it really rewards repeat viewings. The first time I saw it, although I just about got the point of the flashback (because Roy was noticeably more sprightly than he had been on the roof), I still found it hard to 'read' the significance of what I was seeing; I ended up stopping after the first half hour and re-watching it from the beginning. Ray can sometimes be a bit elliptical in his story-telling - although I do think that in this case there may be some intentional confusion in the opening segue. At the start of the flashback, you don't see the face of the horse-rider until he's climbing the stairs, but I think that's the moment when we're supposed to realise, with a shock, that this is the same character we saw in the prologue. Chhabi Biswas was a huge star at the time, so audiences would probably have been struck by how much younger he'd been made to look. (In one of the supplements, Mira Nair comments on how much make-up Biswas was wearing in the flashback scenes.) It’s important that we sense this contrast between the younger Roy and the decayed old man he becomes over the next four years.
Drucker, I think you summed up the ambiguities of the film's attitude towards Roy and Ganguli really well, although I do disagree on a couple of points. It seems to me that the other films you mentioned (some of them, at least - I need to re-watch them) are also about people who think they're making their own way in life, but who are in fact playing into the hands of fate all along. Without spoiling the
Apu Trilogy for those who haven't seen it, it's not hard to see how Apu's parents and Apu himself (at various stages of his life) fit into this pattern - they are sometimes just as deluded about reality as the zamindar in
The Music Room, and although those characters tend to receive more sympathy than Roy does, I do think this film is a little less harsh on its (anti-)hero than you suggest, or than Ray himself wanted it to be...
Drucker wrote:But lest we think Ray wants us to think of him, at the end of the day, as a noble creature, the liner notes make clear this isn't the case. In an interview, Ray said his one regret with the music is that, while it was good, it treated his protagonist with too much dignity.
And I'm so glad that Vilayat Khan gave Ray something to regret here. From what I know of Ray's films, he is at his worst when he gets preachy: the moment he starts spelling out the 'message' of the story, or telling us to think or feel a certain way about his characters, things immediately become clunky and stilted.
What makes this film so brilliant is its intense, immersive empathy for the main character. You’re completely right about the ways in which it critiques him as well, but that critique only carries emotional weight because we’ve been made to understand what is at stake here from the zamindar’s point of view, and because we feel his sense of terror and loss as his world slips away from him. If the film were any more detached than it is, it would have to be a full-blown satirical comedy. I know what you mean about the sarcastic tone, and there are certainly elements of satire here: the ending, I felt, compromised the sense of tragedy with the naff close-ups of Roy on the horse and the shot of the servants turning their heads as he rode across the plain; there are some more successful attempts at wry humour elsewhere in the film. On the whole, though, I think that empathy and tragedy predominate here. And the main character does ultimately seem quite ‘noble’ to me, in a complex way, in spite of his obvious follies. I’ll try and explain what I mean by that below.
chatterjees wrote:I think that our protagonist was fully aware of his situation or his ill fate, but his ego never let him act sensibly. He was not an idiot, he knew everything about his economic crisis. It was just his ego and eagerness to maintain the remnants of his social status, which drove him to the disaster. There are still some people in the Bengali culture, who act in such a way. I have seen some people who still behave like God, just because one of their forefathers used to be a zamindar.
This is one of the big tensions in this film: the extent to which Roy is aware of reality, and the extent to which he remains oblivious to it. I agree that he seems to know what is happening to him, and what is about to happen, but I think the reasons for his wilful state of denial are more complex than ego or a desire to retain his social status.
They have to do with his dawning awareness of how little substance there is left in that status, and how dependent it has become (and has always been) on a series of gestures and performances. The tragedy of this film is that Roy finds himself tasked with sustaining a legacy that consists entirely in appearances. He does have some sense that there are people and things in his life that are more substantial and more important, but the imperative to perpetuate his ancestors’ delusions makes him compulsively perform those prestige-enhancing gestures. If he were not aware that these things are nothing more than gestures, the film would be much less interesting. But I think that his ego is not quite as big as it seems – he is painfully conscious of the void he is trying to cover up.
That void is powerfully represented by the opening shot in the title sequence: the chandelier with all its candles burnt out, its ornate bulbs uncannily producing a sort of faint light of their own, swinging back and forth in an immense blackness. The camera dollies in slowly until the empty bulbs fill the frame, and then we dissolve to an extreme close-up of Biswambhar Roy’s face, before the camera starts dollying back again.
In some sense, the burnt-out chandelier in the void represents Roy. We first see the chandelier from a distance, then get very close to it; then we see Roy up close and slowly draw back from him. This captures something of the film’s ambivalent attitude to its protagonist. The chandelier seems lost and isolated, an absurdly ornate (but also very beautiful) object surrounded by desolation. Roy is the same: the ornate patterning on his gown and chair echo the appearance of the chandelier, while the rooftop of his palace and the water-logged land we see in the distance are bleak and barren. The chandelier is being blown from side to side by the wind, and Roy seems similarly exposed to the elements on the rooftop, with the sky looming over him.
The chandelier-bulbs turn out to be a crucial symbol throughout the film. One of the first things we see in the flashback sequence is bulbs being screwed onto the light fittings along the walls of the palace, and our attention is carefully drawn to the assemblage and lighting of the chandelier before the first recital. The significance of the symbol becomes clear when Roy says (to his anxious wife) that his son is ‘the wick to keep the family flame going’. His point is that the initiation ceremony has to be as lavish as possible, for the sake of ‘prestige’; and not just Roy’s prestige, but that of the family, the torch that Khoka will inherit.
In a sense, the actual initiation seems to occupy a rather subordinate place in this ceremony, although we see Roy looking very seriously at his son during it. For the most part, Khoka himself seems to be absent from the festivities. The fireworks display and music recital form the bulk of this ceremony, and great emphasis is placed not only on Roy’s enjoyment of these displays, but also on his interactions with his peers: he repeatedly looks across at his (unidentified) friend to exchange appreciative looks. They are fellow connoisseurs sharing a moment, but this is also about Roy confirming that his and his family’s prestige is being kept alive in the community. One of the firework displays resembles the chandelier – a constellation of spectacular, transient lights against a black background – and since the chandelier is associated with the music room, we get a sense that the fireworks and the music are all part of the same performance, different but related ways of keeping the wick burning.
There is an interesting scene where Roy continues to play the esraj after the end of his son’s music lesson, telling his wife not to ‘ruin the moment’. On the one hand, we could say that this ‘moment’ has more to do with the music itself than with the now-absent Khoka; on the other hand, it might be precisely the ‘moment’ of connection with his son that Roy is trying to sustain. The latter interpretation carries more weight, I think, because there is no real sense of alienation between father and son: indeed, the strength of the bond between them is part of what makes the mother so anxious. She sees Khoka acquiring his father’s vices – music and riding – and the significance of this is clarified by the moment when Khoka watches his father having his portrait painted. The boy looks from his father to the portrait and back again, and this too is part of his initiation. He is not seeing and interacting with his father solely as a representation; the portrait doesn’t put distance between them. Rather, he is trying to come to terms with the nature and function of such a representation, and to orient himself in relation to it.
Such performances and representations are not simply distractions from ‘what really matters’. We get the sense that they are necessary activities for Roy and his son, specifically because of the increasing prominence of Mahim Ganguli. He represents a threat to Roy because he is becoming more and more proficient in the performance of these roles and gestures that constitute the zamindar’s authority. He can hire the same great musicians, he can be ostentatiously generous to the poor, he can be high-handed and authoritarian. There’s a brilliant and complex scene where Roy learns that Ganguli is throwing a New Year’s party to celebrate the construction of his new house. When he speaks to Ganguli, the zamindar pretends to be reading the paper, then pretends he’s putting on his own party on the same day, then offers to call it off if Ganguli tells him to. Roy is out-performing his new rival, proving that the balance of performative authority still leans towards him. Ganguli cannot call Roy’s bluff by asking him to cancel his party, because that bluff carries so much more conviction than that of the self-made man.
Similarly, after the final music recital, Ganguli tries to throw his money around (literally), but is out-classed by the almost-penniless Roy. That’s where the performance falls apart, of course: Ganguli has money to throw around, whereas Roy at this moment is giving away the last of his wealth. It is tempting to say that Roy’s authority no longer has any substance, whereas Ganguli’s does because he actually has the money and land to back it up. But the film insists that money and even land are just as transient as those other gestures of authority. In
Timon of Athens – a play with which this film has many affinities – the hero is shocked to learn that he cannot mortgage any more of his lands, having foolishly nurtured belief that he owned an unlimited amount of property. But as his faithful, despairing steward points out to him: ‘Oh my good lord, the world is but a word. Were it all yours to give it in a breath, how quickly were it gone.’ Being a rich landowner is like that: you can throw your money away with a flick of the wrist (or drop it while sneezing, as Ganguli does), and your land can be swept away just as quickly by floods. Whatever power and status you may have is as fleeting as the ‘word’, the ‘breath’, by which it is signified. Roy competes with Ganguli through gesture and performance because they represent the only kind of power there is in this world.
(It’s worth comparing that moment in Timon with the one in Ray’s film where the zamindar is appalled by his steward’s claim that there is ‘just one final box of jewels’ to mortgage off; he insists that there is no such thing as a ‘final’ box of jewels. This might seem like a moment of pure denial, belying the idea that Roy has any kind of awareness of reality, but I think his rebuke makes sense in the context of his performance of authority in front of Ganguli. Unlike Timon, Roy knows that, in reality, the jewels can run out. But he also knows that acknowledging this out loud is dangerous: his status depends on the concealment of such truths beneath a façade of boundless self-confidence, and the steward needs to go along with this charade.)
Earlier in the film, as he stands at a window watching his wife and son leaving on their trip, Roy’s face is clouded by a look of foreboding. Behind him, in the background, slightly out of focus, we see two bulbs fitted to the wall, identical to those on the chandelier. Like the bulbs in the first shot of the film, they have no light in them. Given that Roy has already characterised his family in terms of a candle-wick that needs to be kept alight, this composition anticipates the extinguishing of these two ‘lights’ in Roy’s life. The shot is echoed later on when, looking forward to the final music recital, Roy paces excitedly back and forth in this same room. Pictures of his wife and son now hang on a wall (not the same part of the wall as in the earlier shot, but in the same part of the frame the bulbs occupied then), and every time he comes closer to the camera, showing us the excitement in his face, the pictures go out of focus. Later, just before going to the recital, he looks sadly up at the picture of his wife, toying with a festive flower-chain in his hands (like the one he gave her at the start). Then he turns away from the picture, and as he moves closer to a lamp, it casts his shadow against the wall, darkening the picture.
A lot of this would seem to work against the protagonist, hinting that Roy is culpable for the deaths of his wife and son, and specifically that his addiction to music is (in part) what kills them. In their absence, his absorption in those empty, competitive gestures blinds him to his family’s welfare, and contributes to their destruction. During the quarrel between husband and wife after the initiation ceremony, Roy quotes the words of the song: ‘My eyes fill with tears when my beloved is away.’ In doing so, he seems oblivious to the fact that his beloved is right there with him.
But what comes across more strongly, I think, is the sense of love and concern between Roy and his family. Indeed, it seems a happier and less dysfunctional family, in some ways, than Apu’s... There’s a lot of room for disagreement on this point, but I would argue that in a way Roy’s love of music is akin to his love for his family, not a distraction from it. Notice how happy and proud the mother looks when she hears Khoka singing, before she puts on a stern face and tells him to go to bed. During the recitals, Roy responds to the emotion in those songs because it chimes with his own love for his family. Notice what happens when he learns of their deaths. The singer in the music room is likening the falling of raindrops to the rain falling from his own eyes; Roy sees the correspondence between this song and his sense of foreboding about his family’s welfare; when he cradles his dead son in his arms and lets out a heart-rending cry, we cut to a shot of the fountain outside the palace entrance, overflowing with torrential rain. Then we’re in Roy’s bedroom, dark except for some light playing on the walls and ceiling – this light is reflected from the water outside, and Roy says to Taraprasanna (his steward) that there is no land to look after any more, as it has all been destroyed by floods. He refuses to hear any music for the next four years.
Yes, the film suggests that Roy is partly responsible for his family’s deaths, since he summoned them home for the recital. There are terrible storms at this time of year, so it’s a dangerous time to travel, and he should have known that. On the other hand, he clearly didn’t know that – his fault is one of thoughtlessness or forgetfulness, and as soon as he becomes aware of the bad weather he is consumed with worry about his family. The effect would have been very different if he had just callously headed straight for the music room at this point. As it is, he misses the start of the performance, then goes in but can’t stay for more than a few minutes because of his anxieties.
He attends part of this performance, not because he heartlessly wants to enjoy the music in spite of his family’s peril, but because he needs to perform his role as zamindar, host and all-round pillar of the community. Insofar as he actually enjoys music, he cannot do so because the music just makes him think of his family. So here’s the crucial point: there is a distinction between his personal love and appreciation of music and his use of music recitals to maintain his prestige; it is the latter that helps to destroy his family, but the former that in some way connects him to them.
The song is about rain: this rain destroys his land and his family. But the song is also about love, expressed through sadness in the loved one’s absence: Roy expresses this profound emotion by cutting himself off from society and from music. With the family wick extinguished, there is no point in performing those empty gestures any longer. At the same time, since he has no one to love any more, so he can take no enjoyment in the music.
What snaps him out of this is the sound of the initiation ceremony for Ganguli’s son. This music, drifting its way to his palace rooftop, reminds Roy of the events from four years ago, and awakens both his competitive spirit and the long-buried emotions associated with his family. As the final recital approaches, he is torn between painful memories of his love for his wife and son and the thrill of out-classing Ganguli. To some extent, the film suggests that the latter ultimately eclipses the former, that Roy cares more about his status and prestige than he does about his own family. Certainly, this competition with Ganguli is intended to prove that Roy has something the upstart doesn’t, that his pedigree, the blood running through his veins, gives him some sort of innate superiority: an authority that resides not in performance and artifice, but in the very core of his being.
We’re never in any doubt that this is a delusion. Blood and pedigree no longer count, if they ever really did. Property and wealth are the only factors that determine real power now. While it may appear at first glance that Roy is oblivious to this fact, I think that he knows it all too well, and that his drunken rant about the ‘blood in his veins’ in the final scene is a self-conscious, self-mocking performance of nobility. He has to get blind drunk before he can raise a glass to his noble ancestors and his ‘noble self’. The ‘noble self’ he drinks to is his portrait, not his reflection (which he has already recognised as aged and decayed), because he knows perfectly well that his ‘noble self’ is nothing more than paint scraped onto the canvas. A spider crawls up the portrait, preparing to rebuild those cobwebs that Roy scraped off the chandelier with his walking stick. Having chased the spider away, Roy laughs at the ease with which he can stave off the decay of his ‘noble self’, but he is horrified to see the candles burn out and the dawn rise. It makes sense for his parodic boasting to segue into suicidal despair. They stem from the same thing: a deep understanding of how ephemeral his existence really is.
And yet, in a very real sense Roy has won a victory over Ganguli. The last time we see the latter, he is cowed with shame after being put down by his (materially destitute) rival. That victory is about more than just a gesture, or some obscure piece of protocol, or the hierarchy that says a zamindar is better than a money-lender’s son. ‘The host reserves the privilege of giving the first gift’: for one thing, Roy gives Ganguli a lesson in basic human politeness, demanding respect not as his social better but as his host. More important, though, is what happens next, when Roy respectfully holds out his gift so that the dancer can receive it gracefully from his hands, preserving the elegance and poise that are the essence of her profession. Ganguli was about to hurl money at her feet so that she could stoop and pick it up. He does not respect, consider or appreciate those who receive him as a guest or those who perform for his pleasure. His subordinates, as much as his ‘betters’, are grist to his mill, nothing more than objects waiting to be exploited by him.
Roy does not just stand for a deluded, arrogant aristocracy. If the music recitals are, to some extent, part of that empty performance of nobility he feels compelled to sustain, they are also moments of real, profound beauty for which he has a deep and deeply human appreciation. That’s why it’s so important to acknowledge the associations (subtle though they sometimes are) between the beauty and pathos of the music and Roy’s love for his family.
Drucker wrote:I will say that I thought the last musical performance went on a bit long (I lost count of how many tracking close-ups he did to the main character, leaned-over, smoking his hookah), but for the most part I think it was fine.
It’s interesting that you mention this. The other week I was trying to find something coherent to say about Naruse’s dolly shots in
No Blood Relation (and his other silents). Sometimes it seemed as though he was trying to use the camera to convey the sense of a sound, an utterance, or just a look, or a feeling, making its way towards someone, to give the viewer a stronger sense of the dynamics between the characters, to make their interactions almost tangible (can’t think of the right word) in a specifically cinematic way.
In
The Music Room, oddly enough, the effect is quite similar. The camera follows the music as it drifts over the room – the huge fans on either side seem to aid in this process – and especially as it drifts towards and impacts upon Roy in the front row. I think the effect of these shots is to make us feel, not just that we are affected by the music ourselves, but that we are affected by the way in which Roy is affected by it. As with the opening shot of the chandelier, we have to stand back from these moments and see how isolated and decayed Roy is – there is a telling parallel between the wind blowing the chandelier, the fans cooling the decadent spectators in the music room, and the storm that destroys the wife and child and floods the land – but we also have to get closer. We have to understand that these moments are about more than ostentation and prestige, and that Roy’s ‘dangerous addiction’ (as his wife calls it) indicates more than an unhealthy commitment to his noble ancestors’ legacy. Roy is a man who loves music and loves his family, but the portraits in the music room never let him forget that he is also a zamindar with a status to uphold. These two sides to his character cannot be separated, meaning that his best instincts are often hard to distinguish from his worst.
In any case, for me what is left after the film ends is not primarily a sense of futility and folly, but a sense of regret at what has been lost in the (self-)destruction of this man and, paradoxically, an
enduring impression of
fleeting visual and aural beauty. The film is undeniably critical of the decadence of Roy’s existence, and anxious about the intoxicating effects of immersing oneself in these sensual pleasures. But it is just as intoxicated by those pleasures as its protagonist is, and expects us to be so too.