Jalsaghar

Ray's fourth film, a wonderfully evocative anecdote about an elderly aristocrat, slowly dying amid the crumbling splendours of the past, who decides to defy the egalitarian age that is encroaching. For all the rough edges, there is something of Welles here as the ageing aristocrat sits alone in his Xanadu, like Mr Clay in The Immortal Story, dreaming amid the remnants of past magnificence while the bulldozers of modern civilisation hum outside the walls. Something, too, of Chekhov's tender irony as he rebels in a gesture of glorious folly, bankrupting himself to hire the best classical musicians around, dust off the vast chandelier, and bring his ancestral music room to glittering life once more for just one last regal extravaganza. Slow, rapt and hypnotic, it is - given some appreciation of Indian music - a remarkable experience.