Revisited Ray’s Nayak

Nayak (The Hero) – a film on the life of an insanely popular matinee idol, a brash, haughty young superstar riding the waves of popularity and enjoying it to the hilt. 

The answer is hidden in the many layers of the film itself – a film that is so rich, so deep and yet, told in such simple language that perhaps it would not be a mistake to claim that it featured among the best works of Satyajit Ray’s illustrious career.

    A still from "Nayak" 

Arindam Mukherjee is the indomitable superstar in the Bengali film industry and has been riding high on the popularity charts, thanks to a seemingly never-ending string of box office hits. 

He is invited to Delhi to receive a prestigious award, and not being able to secure a flight seat, he boards a train instead, planning to ‘sleep it off’ till he reaches his destination. Travelling along with him in the same train are myriad characters from various walks of life, each with his or her own story.

Aditi abhors the glitz and glamour of meaningless commercial cinema and harbours nothing but mute disdain for the superstar travelling with her.

 Sharmila Tagore plays Aditi with grace, elegance and intelligence, exuding a calm confidence that catches the star’s attention, because he is normally used to see the obliged faces of fans and sycophants crowding around him.

Ray was exceedingly impressed by Uttam Kumar’s acting skills. When Uttam Kumar passed away, Ray wrote in his obituary — ‘I hardly recall any discussion with Uttam on a serious analytical level on the character he was playing. And yet he constantly surprised and delighted me with unexpected little details of action and behaviour which came from him and not from me, which were always in character and always enhanced a scene. They were so spontaneous that it seemed he produced these out of his sleeve. If there was any cogitation involved, he never spoke about it.’

With a touching story, a collection of fantastic performances and a great captain at the helm of it all, Nayak is easily one of Satyajit Ray’s most incisive and detailed studies of human nature.