'Ray' Web Review: Short of Ray!

RayON NetflixDir Srijit Mukherjee Abhishek Chaubey Vasan BalaCast Kay Kay Menon Manoj Bajpayee Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor Ali FazalRating 35Satyajit Ray is Indiarsquos Shakespeare Meaning the sheer volume of work he put out during a lifetime makes one wonder if there was a syndicateteam of ghosts working behind him to make this even physically possibleAlthough of all the things Renaissance Man Ray delved in mdash illustrations novels typography music composition screenwriting filmmaking mdash writing plays to the best of my knowledge wasnrsquot one of themThis anthology of four short films named after the author is based on Rayrsquos short stories This is essential to know because at least the first two shorts here Srijit Mukherjeersquos Forget Me Not and Bahrupiya mdash the latter being particularly macabre mdash posthumously reveal a relatively unexplored dark side of Ray as a writer Still surprising fans with his staggering rangeWatch the trailer of RayUnless these are simply farout reinterpretations by the filmmaker which is also quite likely And precisely what Abhishek Chaubey does with Hangama Hai Kyon Barpa HHKB resetting a Ray story into an altogether Urdu milieu with Manoj Bajpayee playing a ghazal singer and Gajraj Rao a retired pehlwanAll Hindu men play Muslim men inadvertently arguing which cinema always has that on the face of it you canrsquot even tell one from the other So much for politics surrounding them to separate The language is particularly chaste Since Urdu it automatically sounds poeticSpeaking of which given the competently crafted Calcutta landscape Bahrupriya shouldrsquove ideally been in Bangla The timid leadcharacter here applies prosthetic makeup to successfully transform into another person mdash what about his bodyKay Kay Menon plays this role Irsquom told he wished to avoid the Bengali caricature in dialogue Well you get an actor like Kay Kay on board mdash everything eventually seems more than okay doesnrsquot it As does the film of courseAlso bear in mind these are jugaadu pandemic productions mdash given to lower crew strength and limited possibilities for locations Two shorts Forget Me Not and Vasan Balarsquos Spotlight are shot almost entirely inside a hotel Chaubeyrsquos HHKB works around this best with a playfully Wes Andersen feel to neatly colourful interiors for a dreamlike production designSuffice to say these are inherently bright contemporary filmmakers doffing hat to Ray on his birth centenary Does it matter which film is better than the other Ideally not because each different enough that itrsquos hard to compareOnly way to do it then is to base it on which of the lot you remember the most Or the least as it were which for me is probably Balarsquos slightly scattered Spotlight Chiefly because itrsquos another selfdeprecating meta movie on the movie world starring Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor after his extended cameo in the Netflix production AK vs AKAs a short story it still bears the stamp of Ray the most Therersquos talk of stardom dealt with in Nayak 1965 and a religious cult explored in Mahapurush 1965 Spotlight has some of the wittiest oneliners thoughMy favourite from this entire anthology being Kapoor as superstar Vicky Arora telling his girlfriend hersquos breaking up with whorsquos also a Bollywood heroine ldquoDonrsquot come back when Irsquom at the Oscars huh Tum macchardani wali gown pehenke rampwalk karna at Gutkha awardsrdquoWhich was the short film I recall being absorbed by the most Mukherjeersquos Forget Me Not starring the incredibly kinetic Ali Fazal Which is the one I didnrsquot have to speedwatch again before stringing these sentences together HHKB mdash whatrsquos there to ever forget about Bajpayee and Rao jamming on screenThis is also to tell you how I watched Ray Patiently over four days an episode each Felt like I was reading short stories by myself before bed on a personal device mdash something that cinema mimicking a book allows for in a way that itrsquos never done beforeAs per Oscars that define a short film as under 40 minutes including credits ones in this anthology each clocking close to an hour strictly speaking arenrsquot short films Theyrsquore not features either You can click on them separately like episodes in a series something you couldnrsquot do in several similar anthologies by Netflix in the pastAlso readHarsh Varrdhan Kapoor Vasan likes to improvise on setThe form then is as alluring as the content Itrsquos made me hope to rediscover the two seasons of Satyajit Ray Presents mdash series of shorts telecast on Doordarshan in the rsquo80s The only memory of which I have is Shashi Kapoor as Feluda in an episode set in Kathmandu Itrsquos unavailable online Plan to check out Sujoy Ghoshrsquos Ankul 2017 on YouTube perhaps also based on a Ray short storyThatrsquos the thing about the insatiable Ray isnrsquot it Seems like he had multiple lifetimes At any rate his works do as you can tell from this smartly inspired collection as well Canrsquot complainAlso readHarsh Varrdhan Kapoor I am an avid reader of reviews