[Ray's first] films—Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and The World of Apu, form a kind of unified triptych of childhood, adolescence, and young manhood. The Music Room leisurely and patiently unfolds the story of the decline of the last member of a once mighty Indian noble family, revealing the man's character by quiet, ever-acute observation. The film has the quality and complexity usually reserved to an extremely good novel, without losing any of the visual beauty inherent to a first-rate motion picture. In its way, despite the foreign setting and details of Indian life which occasionally are quite alien to us, the film is, in its spirit, close to a number of Chekhov's later short stories or to Joyce's Dubliners: in it a man's life is epiphanized in an hour and a half of film. We are shown all the weaknesses of the man; his vanity, his self-deception, his...