By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Homage masala: Satyajit Ray lives!
At Glamsham.com, Subhash K. Jha reports that Sacred Evil, a new Indian film, is as homage-heavy as anything Quentin T. might make, but the art referenced is weightier. “Not too many people have noticed that Abhiyaan Rajhans and Abhigyan Jha‘s [supernatural thriller] Sacred Evil is strewn with references to and actors from Satyajit Ray‘s films. Not only do we see the Ray regular Soumitra Chatterjee in a cameo, the lady who escorts the film’s protagonist to Soumitra’s office is the heroine of Satyajit Ray’s Kanchenjunga. “That’s right. My affinity to Ray’s cinema goes back a long time. My film contains not only homage to Ray but also to my other idol Ismail Merchant,” Rajhans says. “I was assisting Ismail in a film called Gaachh (The Tree) which was based on the life of Soumitra when I met Ivan Kozelka, the cinematographer of Sacred Evil. Ismail thought very highly of him. And I decided that the day I make my first film Ivan will shoot it for me… Ismail had shot his first film Householder in English and in Calcutta… I obviously chose to do the same. Householder was a black and white film, there is an entire portion of Sacred Evil in which colours have been washed out, leaving only a single colour bright, a red, a yellow or a green but mostly it looks black and white… Ismail’s hero was Ray. And my favourite childhood author was Ray. I read [his novel] ‘Sonar Kella’ 99 times… I believe Ray was a far better writer than a director. That’s not to say he is a lesser director than anyone else. The world is yet to discover the sci-fi and thrillers of Ray. I had the good luck to visit Ray’s personal library while shooting Gaachh and I wasn’t surprised to find his shelves loaded with Isaac Asimov, Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe and O. Henry…
A lot of real time is slowed down in Sacred Evil, just the way Ray liked to in most of his movies. Soumitra, Ray’s favourite actor, appears in a cameo as Dr. Guha. His character in the screenplay is even called Dr. Satyajit Guha. His house and office are situated in a building that was first popularised by Ray’s films. Ismail referred to these as Tagorean houses. And as you noticed, Alaknanda Roy, heroine of Ray’s Kanchenjunga, appears in another cameo as Mrs. Durham. Even Dr. Guha’s maid is a Ray regular… The two opening scenes reveal immediately the subject of the film and the pace in which we will be dealing with it and the mood of the film. This is a decidedly Ray influence.” [Also: a remembrance of Ray from what his 85th birthday from actors Waheeda Rehman, Madhabi Mukherjee, Sharmila Tagore, Aloknanda Roy, Kushal Chakraborty and Soumitra Chatterjee: “He had practically no set method for directing. He would give us enormous freedom. But he would restrain veteran actors when they tended to get theatrical.”; CalcuttaWeb’s bio of Ray has RealPlayer excerpts from over a dozen films, four of which are songs.]