Ever since Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” trailer was released online there’s obviously been a lot of chatter about the film. One uniformed blog naively speculated that the credits that indicated the use of music from the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory might even be a joke on Anderson’s part.
Far from it. As we noted earlier last week, Anderson’s preoccupation with India goes back as least as far as 2002 when he screened Jean Renoir’s India-set film, “The River” with Martin Scorsese (who was instrumental in getting the film re-released on DVD by Criterion). But in fact, Anderson’s been a long-time admirer of the venerable Indian master Ray and dedicated the ‘Darjeeling’ movie to him.
“[Ray’s] work has been an enormous influence on [“The Darjeeling Limited”]… He was my inspiration for coming to India in the first place,” Anderson said in a January 28, 2007 with a local Rajasthan paper, the Statesman. “He is the reason I came here, but his films have also inspired all my other movies in different ways, and I feel I should dedicate the movie to him.”
While North Americans are often fond of the Bollywood pumped out of Mumbai with rather prodigious aplomb, Anderson admitted he’s not very familiar with the genre and again Ray, was his window to India.“My main knowledge of Indian films is Ray’s films, which I learned about from renting “Teen Kanya”(Three Daughters) on Betamax in my video store in Houston, Texas, when I was about 15. I also love Jean Renoir’s film “The River,” which was made by a French director, but is a very beautiful Indian film,” he said. “Ray’s films, along with “The River” and Louis Malle’s documentaries, were essentially all I knew about India before coming here. I became somewhat obsessed with the India I learned about from those films.”
Wes was pretty much hooked on Ray ever since and a quick scan of ‘Life Aquatic’ interviews shows that Wes was already thinking of shooting something in India by the time ‘Aquatic’ was complete.
“Ray is one of my favourites,” Anderson said. “His films (which were usually adapted by him from books) feel like novels to me. He draws you very close to his characters, and his stories are almost always about people going through a major internal transition. My favourites are the Calcutta trilogy of “The Adversary” (“Pratidwandi“), “Company Limited” (“Seemabaddha“), and “The Middleman” (“Jana Aranya“), which are very adventurous and inventive stylistically, and “Days and Nights in the Forest” (“Aranyer Din Ratri“), which I relate to the kind of movies and books that completely captured my attention when I was a teenager, with soulful troublemakers as heroes. I think “Charulata” (“The Lonely Wife“) is one of his most beautiful films, and also “Teen Kanya” (especially “The Postmaster”) and the Apu films.”
Those trying to speculate what Anderson might use musically (and there have been many), need only look at the posters’ obvious “featuring music from the films of” Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory” credit.
As we noted a few weeks ago, this could likely mean the use of Ravi Shankar (who scored Ray’s Apu Trilogy) and Ustad Vilayat Khan (another Sitar maestro) who scored many of the early Merchant Ivory films set in India (while their films are generally known for their reserved British dramas, Ismail Merchant was born in Bombay and didn’t leave India for the United States until he was 22. Little known fact: Merchant Ivory were not only film producers for over 40 years, they were lifelong “partners.” Merchant passed in 2005.)
But almost certainly, we should expect the music of Satyajit Ray himself. After 1961’s aforementioned “Teen Kanya,” the director became frustrated with outside musicians and began composing much of his own music for his films.
Anderson loves the aforementioned 1964 Ray film, “Charulata” (aka The Lonely Wife“) so much, that he appropriated the movie’s Ray-composed song, “Charu Theme” for the beginning of “The Darjeeling Limited” trailer (the song that appears before the Lola Vs. Powerman… Kinks tracks).
So the use of songs composed by polymathematic Ray are a strong bet, though at the time, even Anderson was having a hard time tracking down all the originals scores he wanted.
“I listened to Ray’s scores continuously during [the film’s writing] process, and I have selected numerous cues that I think are perfect for my story. I would love to hear more however, I would love to listen to the soundtrack from “Kanchenjungha” ” he told the Statesman. “I would like to fill the movie with Ray’s music, and in some places I have ideas to sculpt the scenes around the music rather than vice-versa. I would like to use the Ray scores exactly as I would use an original score written for my own film.”
Download: Satyajit Ray – “Charu Theme”
