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The gentle pun is on elevated sentiments, cf. Reed's Climbing High, "a most crucial day" for tourists at a Darjeeling resort. Industrialist and Anglophile, the head of the family (Chhabi Biswas) is too involved in his own lordly satisfaction to notice the malaise of his wife (Karuna Banerjee). The matter at hand is the potential "acquisition" of an affluent son-in-law, the Glasgow-bound suitor (N. Viswanathan) expected to propose to the youngest daughter (Alokananda Roy). In the middle are the quarrels of elder daughter (Anubha Gupta) and husband (Subrata Sensharma), thus the lineage of arranged marriage, one couple at different stages. "No need to flaunt your wisdom!" An hour and a half of real time is all Satyajit Ray needs for emotional shifts and natural epiphanies, nothing happens and everything happens. "Something for the younger generation to work out," muses the patriarch, his son (Anil Chatterjee) fancies himself a photographer who specializes at striking out with the chic lasses. The other lad is a struggling tutor (Arun Mukherjee) who proudly refuses the old man's patronage, his guffawing joy at not being bought bumps against a sudden twinge of regret. The couple on the park bench contemplate their love grown cold while the tiny daughter goes round and round astride her pony, the one on the winding road meander past pine trees to face the Himalayan vastness. (The reverse angle reveals a cacophonous pack of donkeys passing by.) "Haven't you read The Home and the World?" Rolling mist makes for a blanched screen on which Ray imprints his heroine's conflicted visage, his camera studies chaste beauty all around not unlike the binoculars of the bird-watching uncle (Pahari Sanyal). The eponymous mountain materializes at last, "just a glimpse" missed by the father but not by Rohmer (The Green Ray).
--- Fernando F. Croce |