Hitting the road? Here are three recommendations about trips that get out of hand.

If you’ve talked to me in the last couple of weeks, you’ve no doubt heard me gush about Satyajit Ray’s exquisite Days and Nights in the Forest, a funny and touching Bengali language Indian film that I’ve now seen twice at Film Forum. The film’s been restored beautifully—see it in theaters if you can, though I’m sure a DVD is around the corner. It’s quickly become my favorite Ray, surpassing his also excellent Charulata and The Apu Trilogy.

Satyajit Ray is a legend, and wrote, directed, scored, and did the graphics for Days and Nights. Ray is one of those artists who seems to have more hours in the day than the rest of us. Not only did he make dozens of films, but he wrote novels (including the very fun detective Feluda books), revived and edited a children’s literature magazine (সন্দেশ, “Sandesh”), and was a graphic designer who won an award for two of his fonts (Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre). A colossal output.

Days and Nights in the Forest is a sort of lost weekend movie that follows four young urbanites from Calcutta who road trip to Palamu, in the forested country, for a few days away. Based on a Sunil Gangopadhya novel, Ray’s dialogue is natural and very funny, with a playwright’s attention to scene. The plot is small, but what makes this film memorable are its characters. The four leads are overconfident and loutish, spending their time drinking, rambling, and clumsily working through their worries about the future. They’re men of a certain class and standing, and consider themselves men of the world and are proud of it. They sprinkle their Bengali with plenty of English and reminisce fondly about working 16 hour days on a literary journal they founded.

But they can’t hide their insecurities and inabilities as well as they think. While they’re playful with each other, they are deeply cruel and indifferent to those they consider below them, a class dynamic Ray plays to great narrative and emotional effect. They hand out bribes, stagger about drunk, and behave horribly to the locals. They don’t seem to care to learn, throwing their guidebook out of a car window on their way into town. Even with their peers they’re unreflective—a flashback reveals the heartbroken cricket player Hari (Samit Bhanja) was dumped because he dashed off a callously short reply to a love note. “I can’t love someone who writes like that,” his ex says.

Ray has a sympathy for these floundering men, not as victims but as people relying on the wrong structures for support. Though their are limits to Ray’s concern for his boys, and by the end of the movie, their experiences don’t transform them as much as confirm their confidences and assumptions.

The writing and acting is superb. Rabi Ghosh is great as the buffoonish and haughty Shekhar, unemployed and obsessed with eggs and decorum, who scoffs at anything “too bourgeois” while also refusing to drink any liquor that isn’t imported scotch. Ghosh is a gifted comedic actor, with wonderful reactions and line deliveries, from the crisp “all hippies” when they decide to forgo shaving, to every moment when he delights in eating eggs.

The movie crystalizes when the four meet their class peers, the Tripathi family, at their summer cottage. The two young Tripathi women, the perceptive and wounded Aparna and her widowed sister-in-law Jaya, immediately see through the boys.

Sharmila Tagore’s Aparna is the best performance of the movie. Aparna is calculating and assessing, never giving anything away from behind her modish sunglasses—she rather literally bites her tongue throughout. Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee) is infatuated, though he admits that he can’t figure Aparna out. “Is that necessary?” she replies. Her vigilance is intimidating and alluring.

Does Aparna get what she wants? Is she more of a self-possessed femme fatale cut from a noir, or a similarly lost urbanite like the boys? It’s hard to know, and the real depth of her desire and pain is inscrutable to us.

Her sister-in-law Jaya, played by Kaberi Bose, is much more eager to hang out but just as aware as Aparna. Jaya tries to seduce one of the men, only to have him respond timidly and with less excitement than when she offers him instant coffee. Her nervousness about this leap of vulnerability is sound-tracked by a clock loudly ticking as she tries to lead him along (“How do I look?”). The sound is a sort of “Tell-Tale Heart” indication of her emotional roiling, and the failed attempt at romance is heartbreaking.

Ray’s precision with all of his characters is rewarded in one of the movie’s best scenes, a memory game around a picnic blanket. Each famous name the characters pick are obvious and surprising.

Days and Nights in the Forest is about what people take with them on vacation, and what they bring home when they return. This dynamic is taken to extreme, surreal heights in Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes, about a man whose idyll is derailed entirely.

Woman in the Dunes is about a Tokyo teacher named Jumpei who visits the country to catch bugs. When he misses his bus, a group of villagers offer Jumpei a place to stay for the night: a lone woman’s house in the sand dunes, hidden in a pit accessible by a rope ladder. The next morning the ladder is gone. He’s alone with this mysterious woman, in a house that is constantly filling with sand as the desert reasserts itself. Jumpei is expected to help keep the sand at bay, collect water and, eventually, have kids with the woman.

The book is a delirious experience, a surreal tale of survival as we follow Jumpei trying to puzzle through what’s going on while clinging to his sanity. There is so much sand all over the book, for both Jumpei and for the reader. The endless descriptions of the sand’s pervasiveness, its grit, and its dryness, instills a real fear.

It’s a heightened version of the tension Ray is playing with in Days and Nights: the curiosity of traveling and the wistful desire to leave civilization behind (Abe: “Sand and insects were all that concerned him”; and Ray: Shekhar burns their newspaper to disconnect completely). But in both cases there is something darker underneath the surface, revealing the prejudices and debts the characters couldn’t leave behind in the city. For both Abe and Ray, there’s a deep interest in the structures of class and social expectation—the Woman in the Dunes’s epigraph reads “Without the threat of punishment there is no joy in flight.” Abe’s exploration is more surreal, but asks similar questions as Ray: What do we want as individuals? And how do we navigate those desires butting up against our responsibilities and the judgements of others? None of us can let the sand pile up for too long.

Some of the strangest relationships of obligation are with our coworkers, something the darkly comedic novel The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge explores in very high stakes. Like Days and Nights, The Bottle Factory Outing is funny and full of strange, criss-crossing romances and cultural divides. The action follows two coworkers, Freda and Brenda, who go off on a work trip/sightseeing excursion. But when someone ends up dead, the trip shifts to culprits and cover-ups.

Bainbridge’s writing is grotesquely funny, finding heightened tensions in grim situations. There’s also great moments of observant satire in the webs of attraction, class, and power that are carried over from the workplace. There’s also a cultural exchange at play here, like in Ray’s film. The Italian bottle factory is a constant source of humor, with the characters bumping up against assumptions and disconnects—Brenda, an aspiring actress, is late to work and notes confidently, “Foreigners…understand about the artistic temperament.”

So much of Bainbridge’s dialogue is this sharp. The characters are precisely strange, interestingly fumbling, and share with Days and Nights’s protagonists an anxious impatience and confusion. This is especially true of Bainbridge’s two female characters. Freda is younger and more ambitious, while Brenda has more experience to juggle, having moved and taken a job at the bottle factory after a divorce. Both remind me of Ray’s leads, who sense that they’re being thwarted or not meeting expectations, but seem unable or unwilling to resolve anything. It’s a reflectiveness that will be familiar to anyone who feels like they’re reaching the end of early adulthood with too little to show for it.

There’s an anxiety in all these works, and I feel myself drawn to their questions of obligation and desire. When we’re pulled in many directions, often simultaneously—money and love overlap in Ray when Aparna writes her number on a five rupee note—the weight of obligations can feel like a warping pressure. Each of these stories presents a different way past this tension, from avoidance, to acceptance, to criminal conspiracy. The indecision behind wondering “How should a person be?” is something we’ll all face, whether it’s about a romantic infatuation, or a sudden crisis, or a home filling endlessly with sand.

Image from IMDB.com