An Avid Reader’s Review: 3 Things Netflix’s ‘Ray’ Got Right & 3 Things It Messed Up

As an introverted Bengali kid hailing from a remote corner in the North-East who was not even into sports, entertainment for me meant reading books. While Bengali children back in the day had no dearth of storybooks to fall back on during vacations and leisure time, for me it was a full time engagement, as I preferred living in a fantasy world, thanks to the constant crisis I didn’t know how to address back then, but can now address as ‘existential dread induced by anxiety’.

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As that nerdy kid who didn’t fit in, I owe so much to the legend that Mr Satyajit Ray was, that it would be a folly to even try to put that into words. I had read and re-read everything he has ever written – Feluda, Professor Shonku, Tarinikhuro – before jumping on to the Harry Potter bandwagon that the world had just woken up to. However, he has written a lot more, and every character he created offered something special, that was enough to tie children and adults alike to the quick-turning pages of his super entertaining stories.

Naturally, when the trailer of Netflix’s Ray dropped, I had to immediately find out which stories were being retold, and revise them once before watching the series. I did it, and I honestly have mixed feelings. Before getting into details, however, I have to say it out loud to people who have read the original stories in Bengali: Please do not expect those stories to come to life, as you’ll be colossally disappointed if you do that.

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Here are 3 things that Netflix’s Ray got right, even from the perspective of an avid reader like me.

1. A super talented cast, consisting of some of the best actors in the industry, is one of the biggest assets of Ray. Be it Ali Fazal’s frantic search for the truth, or Kay Kay Menon’s quiet desperation, or the magical chemistry between Manoj Bajpayee and Gajraj Rao – every episode is a delight on that front, when viewed for the first time.

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2. The slow burn of the background music in Ray is perfect for the stories. While parallels were drawn with the BGM of Marvel’s Black Widow as soon as the trailer dropped, it perhaps should be taken as a compliment, as the background score has been on point, which only complements the intensity of the stories.

3. The camera work and the cinematography is absolutely stunning. Right from the melting effect of the train compartment into a stage in ‘Hungama Hai Kyon Barpa’ to the ominous darkness in every frame of ‘Bahrupiya’ starting right from the opening shot, Ray has been a visual delight.

Now, let’s look at what everyone is talking about – what did Ray mess up?

1. The first thing, without a shred of doubt, that Ray failed to capture is the simplistic, rustic relatability that was the biggest characteristic of Satyajit Ray’s creations. While one may argue that it is a tough feat to pull off, the treatment for all the stories has been such that it fails to reflect the soul that Ray’s stories were all about. Reading the stories once again took me back to my childhood, however, watching them on screen remotely didn’t.

2. While creative liberty is something that should be accounted for, altering the stories to an extent that they barely can be called a Satyajit Ray creations at all, is something that all four stories are guilty of, especially Vasan Bala’s ‘Spotlight’. Barring the involvement of an actor in both the stories, there barely is any similarity between the two. While it is understood that the ‘126 year old gentleman’ was replaced with a fraudulent religious figure, the essence of the original story was completely lost in the recreation. Even the clever attempt at throwing in multiple Satyajit Ray movie names along with a similar frame from the iconic ‘Bhuter Raja’ scene fell flat.

3. All the movies are guilty of being unnecessarily stretched out. All of the original stories, in their essence, are ‘short’ stories, and none of them needed as much time as 50 minutes to an hour. The stories, even with brilliant narration, could have been kept much tighter, and the editing could have been much crisper. All of them felt unnecessarily long, and there were scenes that felt like they were forcefully fit into the narrative, just to extend the screen time.

In a nutshell, while it was unbelievably exciting to revisit some of my favourite stories from childhood, parts of this experience was just as awkward as the pronunciation of ‘Didi’ (like DD as in Door Darshan) in Spotlight.