Sumit Mitra

Satyajit Ray’s most sexually charged film, it is a voyage of four friends over a weekend that turns into a deep exploration of their desires. The four characters are so different from each other that one may at first wonder how could they flock together. But Ray’s script masterfully uses them like different movements in a sonata. In the hilly and forested landscape of the film, the city-bred characters interweave not only with two women of a polished household nearby but a tribal woman of the village, played by Simi Garewal, who has the best physical features but is the least sexually repressed. And the forest of the journey becomes quite a Freudian landscape.