Jalsa Ghar

Indian films are notorious for their music sequences, where for no apparent reason the story comes to a complete stop so that the cast can go into a lengthy dance number. Unsurprisingly, this aesthetic didn’t appeal to Satyajit Ray, whose previous works (the first two chapters of the Apu Trilogy) were slow, considered films inflected with neo-realism. But the lack of box office success for Aparajito led him to questioning whether he could create a picture that tapped into the Indian audience’s love for musicals without compromising the depth of its story and characters.

The Music Room centers around an aging aristocrat whose greatest love in life is classical Indian music. Even when it means selling his wife’s jewelery, he’s willing to pay for Bengal’s finest musicians to play performances at his estate. This comes to an end, though, when his directive that his wife and son must head home to see one of these masters perform leads to their deaths, and the second half of the film centers around how he copes with this loss and ultimately succumbs to his grief.

By centering the story around a music aficionado, Ray solves the problem of music sequences by having each of them motivated by the protagonist and his neighbor’s desires to one-up each other, creating a space for them in the plot in the same way that Robert Altman would with Nashville 20 years later. The sequences themselves are stunning. Classical Indian music can be difficult for Western ears, but Ray chose musicians so virtuosic and films them so lovingly it’s nearly impossible to dislike the performances.

The Complete Paste Magazine Review Here.