VOD film review: Sonar Kella
Review Overview
Engrossing sprawling narrative
10Sweeping vistas, oblique angles
10Delightful characters
10Ian Winterton | On 15, Jul 2021
Director: Satyajit Ray
Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Santosh Dutta, Siddartha Chatterjee, Sailen Mukherjee, Ajoy Banerjee, Kamu Mukherjee, Kushal Chakraborty
Certificate: TBC
Where to watch Sonar Kella online in the UK: Amazon Prime
Made almost 20 years on from his debut, Pather Panchali, the epic family saga that made his name, Sonar Kella is a soaring example of another side of Satyajit Ray’s work. Based on his own novel, it’s a family-friendly detective movie, revolving around six-year old boy, Mukal (Kushal Chakraborty), and a quest to find a golden fortress that – he claims to recall from a previous life – may contain valuable jewels. But, playful a premise as this is, Sonar Kella remains a quintessentially Ray film.
Its engrossingly sprawling narrative is populated with memorable heroes and villains and – best of all – endearingly flawed supporting characters. Ray’s camera, too, provides us with both sweeping landscapes and expertly framed domestic settings, occasional extreme close-ups or shots viewed from intriguingly oblique angles.
In common with Ray’s other films, Sonar Kella is a bona fide epic too. It begins with six-year-old boy Mukal drawing obsessively in the middle of the night. With the boy telling his distraught parents that his pictures are of his previous incarnation – which, by the look of it, was sometime during India’s Mughal period – it’s a scary but gripping opening. “I knew war,” Mukal intones, prefiguring Haley Joel Osment’s creepy “I see dead people” in The Sixth Sense by 25 years.
Central to Mukal’s visions of his past life is the titular “sonar kella”, which translates as “golden temple”. Claiming to have lived there, Mukal also mentions that there were many jewels he buried there. It’s when this information is printed in the local newspaper that the story proper begins, as the story’s villainous duo – Amiyanath Burman (Ajoy Banerjee) and Mandar Bose (Kamu Mukherjee) – spy an opportunity to get rich.
Established from the off as inept – though this is played to make them more dangerous and desperate, rather than comic – they kidnap the wrong Mukal from the neighbourhood, thus alerting our Mukal’s parents. By this time, though, Mukal has departed with kindly Dr Hemanga Hajra (Sailen Mukherjee), a parapsychologist, on a quest to find the golden fortress and uncover evidence that Mukal’s claims are true. Mukal’s parents alert the film’s hero, Feluda (Soumitra Chatterjee) – a private investigator.
By placing a detective at the centre of the narrative Ray enables himself to tell a universal mystery story that – like the India he’s documenting – is a hybridisation of both Western and Eastern culture. Feluda is part wise Indian sage – we first meet him with his feet in the air his morning yoga pose – and part Sherlock Holmes, forever deducing the truth from seemingly inconsequential details.
This makes for a dizzying ride that – although well over two hours in duration – is a captivating adventure, something Ray playfully hints at early on when Topshe, Feluda’s teenage cousin (and the Watson to his Holmes) is seen reading a Tintin comic book, and elsewhere a child receives a 007 handgun as a gift.
This being India, the railways play a large part in transporting both heroes and villains across the subcontinent, and it’s in a train compartment that Feluda and Topshe pick up a delightful companion in the form of Jatayu (Santosh Dutta), a writer of pulp novels. There for comedic value, he’s a loveable man who, despite being scared a lot of the time, is nevertheless brave. In short, he’s just like a character from a children’s adventure book.
Sonar Kella is a near-perfect movie but – for those viewing this on Amazon Prime Video – be warned. It’s a poor print and the English subtitles are woeful, which is hardly the optimal way to view a cinematic classic (although whenever Feluda smokes, having the Indian Government’s warning that this is “injurious to health” is a nice curio). Although buying a decent DVD or viewing it in an actual cinema would be preferable, Ray’s filmmaking is so strong that, even in this form, its quality shines through.
To modern, Western eyes, Sonar Kella may seem alien and perhaps, even, a forbidding prospect. But, by trusting in Ray, one can settle into the film’s rhythms and tone within minutes and, like millions of Indians for whom this is a childhood cult classic, be swept away by a story that is full of both magical, childhood wonder and an epic exploration of faith, belief, greed and heroism.
Sonar Kella is available to watch online on Amazon Prime Video as part of a Prime membership or a £5.99 monthly subscription.