The Carnivalesque in Satyajit Ray's Nights and Days in the Forest (1970)

The Ray Punish quartet of Ashim, Sanjoy, Hari and Shehkar of his1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri resolve to break all the forces that tie them to the city of Calcutta. Leaving the city they embark on a reckless holiday in the forests of Palamau in the neighboring state of Bihar. Ashim and Sanjoy are professionals. Ashim is a successful executive and Sanjoy is a high-ranking labor officer in a jute mill. Both are old friends who have even worked together on a literary journal they once used to bring out. Hari is a famous cricket player and Shehkar is the group's self-appointed clown. He is a gambler and a parasite with no steady profession. Each of the four men project a need to renounce Calcutta and replace it with the ambience of the forest they choose to enter. Ashim finds his professional success hollow and boring; Sanjoy is tired of hiding his middle-class timidity behind his Marxist rhetoric; Hari has been jilted (and slapped) by his sophisticated Calcutta girlfriend; and Shekhar who had nothing really important to do in Calcutta (the advent of the horse-racing season being a week away), has his gambling racebook thrown out of the speeding car in the film's opening moments.