Shonar Kella

Today I watched Shonar Kella, Satyajit Ray's film based on his own story featuring the detective, Feluda. I have seen this film once before on television. This time I watched the DVD, and it was a better print with bright colors. However, the subtitles are arranged in a way that would really irritate a viewer who doesn’t know Bengali. At many places, subtitles are shown on the screen just for a fraction of a second and they vanish before we get a chance to fully read them. Couple of times, I tried rewinding and then pausing at the scene to read the subtitle, but I had difficulty in "catching" the subtitled scene even after several attempts which tested my patience.

Shonar Kella was the third Feluda story that Ray wrote, and the story in which he introduced the character Jatayu. The film is mostly set in Rajasthan. Mukul, a 6-year old boy living at Calcutta, starts getting memories of his "previous birth" in which he lived at a house near an ancient fort that he calls shonar kella (golden fortress). The news gets published in the newspapers and a set of crooks get interested in the story as they think that they could find some ancient treasure with the boy's help. Meanwhile, Dr. Hajra, a parapsychologist, also wants to study this case, and he takes Mukul to Rajasthan to see if the "golden fortress" in the boy’s stories would be somewhere in Rajasthan. The villains follow them, and Feluda and Topshe are to rescue the boy, and the doctor.

Andrew Robinson, in his book The Inner Eye (which is the finest book on Ray and his films that I have read) writes: "He (Satyajit Ray) felt it would be more interesting to let the audience know who the villains were at an early stage, but keep the detective guessing - 'so it becomes more or less like a Hitchcock story where you know who the killer is.' Character therefore takes precedence over plot...". Shonar Kella has several beautifully photographed scenes, and the acting performances of Soumitra Chatterjee (Feluda) and Santhosh Dutta (Jatayu) are brilliant and they perfectly match their images I had in my mind while reading the story. However, I felt that Jai Baba Felunath, Ray's second Feluda film, is a superior work.