DVD Pick: 'The Music Room'

Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) is most famous for the Apu Trilogy — Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959) — but he made at least one other masterpiece that has often appeared on lists of the 100 greatest movies of all time. That masterpiece is The Music Room (1958), which has now been released on DVD and Blu-ray by Criterion Collection. The feature film is in Bengali with English subtitles.

The Music Room is a character study of an imperious elderly titled aristocrat named Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas in an unforgettable performance). Except for two old servants, Roy lives alone in a huge decaying palace in the middle of nowhere. In flashback, we see him in his heyday, when scores of peasants lived on his lands and he had many employees. Back then his wife and adolescent son lived with him, and his great passion was hosting recitals in the palace's music room. But after tragedy struck, Roy let everything go downhill. Still, he lives in faded splendor and keeps his feudal mindset, even when his crass neighbor, a moneylender's son, gets a noisy electric generator.

But what makes The Music Room so wonderful is the combination of Satyajit Ray's visual artistry and the classical Indian music on the soundtrack. The high points of the film are three musical performances at recitals hosted by Roy: the first featuring a female singer, the second a male singer and the third a female dancer. For most of us Westerners, the music and dance are very strange, but they work beautifully in the context of the story.

The two-disc DVD set containing The Music Room provides a total of nearly three hours of extras.

Disc One provides three featurettes. The best is the 17-minute English-language "For the Love of Music," in which Andrew Robinson, Bengali culture expert and author of Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, supplies some interesting information about the feature film. There is also a 16-minute English-language interview with filmmaker Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding), who knew Ray personally, and she gives her reactions to The Music Room. Finally, there's a 10-minute segment from a 1981 French TV program where a three-person panel discusses the feature film with Ray.

Disc Two consists of a long — 2 hours 11 minutes — documentary titled Satyajit Ray. It's stated on the DVD that the documentary was completed in 1984, but the IMDb gives its year of release as 1982. The meat of the documentary has filmmaker Shyam Benegal interviewing Ray in English intercut with clips from about 30 of Ray's films. In addition, there's footage of Ray directing The Home and the World (1984), and he also talks some about his youth. In a workmanlike manner, the documentary imparts quite a bit of information.

Packaged with the DVDs is a worthwhile 36-page booklet. It contains an interesting article on The Music Room by film journalism teacher Philip Kemp, an amusing 1963 article by Ray about how they found the real-life palace where the movie was shot, and a 1986 interview where Ray looks back on various aspects of making the film.

DVD Release Date: July 19, 2011
Number of DVDs: 2
Feature Film Runtime: 1 hour 39 minutes
MPAA Rating: Not Rated