Frames per second: Fun and games, from Satyajit Ray and Wes Anderson

Business Standard

11-05-2025

In Asteroid City (2023), directed by Wes Anderson, five teenagers play a memory game. According to its rules, the first player names a well-known person, living or dead. The second repeats that name and adds another. The third repeats both and adds a third, and so on. The game continues in a circle until someone forgets a name—they are then declared out. The last player remaining is the winner.
The game begins with famous names, but the teenagers soon realise it will last too long—they all have extraordinary memories. In fact, they are child prodigies gathered in the fictional desert town of Asteroid City, along with their families, to be honoured as Junior Stargazer awardees for their inventions. Bored, they decide to invert the game, recalling the names in reverse order.
Shortly after the film's release, cinephiles noticed that the memory game is identical to the one played by characters in Satyajit Ray's 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest). In Ray's film, the players are not teenagers, but young Bengali men and women from Calcutta vacationing in Palamu, a forested region now in Jharkhand. In fact, one of the characters, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), names Cleopatra—just as Dinah (Grace Edwards) does in Asteroid City —suggesting a deliberate homage.
Ray's influence on Anderson is well-documented. The premise of Anderson's 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited, in which a train journey transforms its protagonists, is often seen as inspired by Ray's 1966 film Nayak. It is therefore no surprise that Anderson—alongside Sharmila Tagore and Simi Garewal, both of whom acted in Aranyer Din Ratri —will present a restored version of the film at the Cannes Film Festival later this year. In a note, Anderson described the film as 'a nearly-forgotten… gem… From the master, another masterpiece'. The restoration is a collaboration between The Film Foundation (of which Anderson is a board member), the Film Heritage Foundation, and The Criterion Collection/Janus Films. It is a fitting tribute from an admirer to a master.
Games frequently appear in Ray's films. In Charulata (1964), the titular protagonist (Madhabi Mukherjee) plays cards with her sister-in-law Manda (Gitali Roy); in Shakha Proshakha (1990), family members engage in tongue twisters during a picnic; and in Shatranj ke Khilari (1977), the protagonists Mirza Sajjad Ali (Sanjeev Kumar) and Mir Roshan Ali (Saeed Jaffrey) are addicted to chess in 19th-century Lucknow. Cultural critic Sibaji Bandyopadhyay described the memory game in Aranyer Din Ratri as an occasion of 'unwitting self-betrayal'.
The names mentioned during the game reveal each player's inner world. Sanjay (Subhendu Chatterjee), a labour officer, names Karl Marx and Mao Zedong—icons of the leftist movements shaking Bengal in the late 1960s. Aparna's Cleopatra and Hari's (Samit Bhanja) Helen of Troy mirror each other in their mythic resonances. Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee) names Shakespeare and Tek Chand Thakur (the pseudonym of 19th-century Bengali writer Peary Chand Mitra), betraying his earlier literary ambitions.
There's another layer to the game, deepening the narrative tension. Realising that Ashim is too chauvinistic to lose gracefully to a woman, Aparna pretends to forget the names. Later, as they walk in the forest, she flawlessly recites the entire list, revealing that his victory was a gift. This sparks a self-reflective moment in Ashim, prompting a subtle transformation by the film's end.
Film scholar Darius Cooper interprets the four men—Ashim, Sanjay, Hari, and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh)—through Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, from Rabelais and His World (1965), suggesting that they wish to renounce Calcutta and replace it with the forest's ambience. This desire is symbolised in an early scene where they burn a copy of The Statesman, ritually severing ties with the city and modernity. However, critic Suranjan Ganguly argues that the forest in Ray's film is no pastoral escape. 'Shorn of its flora and fauna (the animals now perform in the circus), its inhabitants, the tribal Santals, are no better off, corrupted by money, drink, and urban sprawl,' he writes. For Ganguly, the forest represents illusion, not transformation.
Illusion is also central to Asteroid City, whose layered meta-narratives are a hallmark of Anderson's work. The child prodigies' tale is not real—it is a play written by the fictional playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and directed by Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) for the stage. The play's production is embedded in a 1950s-style TV documentary, narrated by an unnamed host (Bryan Cranston).
Scenes from the lives of Earp, Green, and others—such as Earp's romance with actor Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman), or a visit from Green's estranged wife Polly (Hong Chau)—intercut the play's narrative, reinforcing its fictionality. The play is in vibrant Technicolor, while the documentary is in black and white.
Asteroid City itself is clearly a set more than a real town, imagined near a nuclear test site where mushroom clouds bloom ominously. At intervals, a police car chases a gang of outlaws, exchanging gunfire—though none of the residents seem to notice.
On their first night, the characters witness a rare astronomical event. A UFO descends and steals a 5,000-year-old meteorite that gives the city its name. The US president then imposes a quarantine, evoking the lockdowns of the Covid-19 era.
In a scene from the framing documentary, playwright Conrad Earp describes his characters' state: 'I'd like to make a scene where all my characters are each gently, privately seduced into the deepest, dreamiest slumber of their lives, as a result of their shared experience of a bewildering and bedazzling celestial mystery.' His alternative title for the play is The Cosmic Wilderness. Within a week of quarantine, he imagines, 'Our cast of characters' already tenuous grasp of reality has further slipped… and a group begins to occupy a space of the most peculiar emotional dimensions.'
Asteroid City is as much a pastoral retreat as the forests of Aranyer Din Ratri. The characters' ritualistic withdrawal into these spaces sets the stage for transformation. By embedding the memory game within such rituals, both Ray and Anderson stretch the limits of cinematic storytelling.
The essential difference between a ritual (like a carnival or festival) and a game is that rituals have predictable outcomes, while games do not. Yet in cinema, even games are narrative tools, fully controlled by the storyteller. They excite the audience, but their outcomes are predetermined.
Still, the games serve another function: they invite the audience into the narrative. The rituals in both films may exclude viewers from the characters' transformations—but the memory game continues beyond the films. Like the alien who inventories the meteor and returns it, we too are changed by the 'bewildering and bedazzling' cinematic experience. Whether we let it transform us is a game of our own choosing.