BENGALURU: An unquenchable thirst for variety is the hallmark of a great artist. Having directed several feature films and one documentary, Ray made a short film in 1964 - a twelve-minute film under the banner of ‘Esso World Theatre’, a cultural programme telecast by the non-profit government-funded television programming distributor in America named the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) and sponsored by the American oil company Esso.
In a bid to showcase the world outside their own to their viewers, and yet to make them understand what was being shown on screen, the producers had requested Ray to make the film in a Bengali setting but in the English language. The combination didn’t quite appeal to Ray, who decided to solve the problem by doing away with the spoken word altogether in his film, seeing this as an opportunity to pay tribute to the golden era of silent films. The film he thus made was called Two, and it depended solely on sound and music. Although it is perhaps the least watched of Ray’s works, critics and experts around the world consider it one of the best films ever made by him.
Ray called Two a ‘film fable’, one which showed two boys, both six- seven years old, duelling with each other, each showing off his toys in a bid to outdo the other, in the middle of a lonely and breezy summer afternoon. The first boy comes from an affluent family. The film opens with a shot (which was later used in another short film by Ray titled Pikoo) of his parents leaving him alone at his palatial home with a large collection of toys. The boy, wearing a Mickey Mouse cap, wanders from room to room, bursting balloons from the night before, which happened to be his birthday.
He plays with his toys, especially with a robot he has been gift ed and a toy tower that he has been building all morning. Despite all the toys around him, he soon gets bored and is wondering what to do to pass time, when, suddenly, on hearing the sound of a flute, he rushes to his window to find a young boy of the same age as he, living in a shanty dwelling in the grassland behind his house, playing his flute happily. In a bid to draw the poor boy’s attention, the rich boy brings his own expensive electronic trumpet to the window and bellows with it.
And soon, before you know it, the two boys begin showing off their toys and masks to each other-the rich kid’s expensive ones, and the poor boy’s cheap, handmade ones. Very soon, the poor boy realises that his prized possessions are no match for the rich boy’s, and decides to give up and engage himself in flying his kite instead. The rich boy is clearly not happy with this decision, because he is confined to the house and his competitor is out there in the open.
In a fi t of childish envy, he shoots the poor boy’s kite down with his toy airgun. Realising that the rich boy is way too powerful and will not let him play in peace, the poor boy sadly retires behindhis hut and resumes playing his flute. The rich boy, now victorious but left all alone, sits and thinks about what he has done, even as he tries to drown out the sound of the flute in the cacophony of his toys. In the final scene of the film, his toy robot, now left unattended and unguided, walks into the tall tower he has built with painstaking efforts, making it crash to the ground.
(Excerpted with permission from ‘The Cinema of Satyajit Ray’ by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay, published by Westland Non fiction)