Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Adapted from the 1916 novel by Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and The World (1984) is the work of a veteran filmmaker who conveys the depths of his characters with a stately efficiency. The film is a love triangle not unlike Charulata. Where that film had scenes that were a visual tour de force, the humanity of the characters were sometimes lost in stagey scenes of men talking about politics ad nauseum. The Home and the World doesn’t pull out the cinematic stops that make Charulata a visually striking film, but its lush, warm cinematography and static camera lets his stellar cast do the work. Set in the early 20th century, the film depicts Indian politics that will be unfamiliar to most Western viewers, but his rich characters drive along the competing ideas without being reduced to a mouthpiece for ideology. Nikhil (Victor Banerjee) is a modern thinker who feels his traditionally minded wife Bimala (Swatilekha Chaterjee) should be more emancipated, so he introduces her to his old friend Sandip (Ray regular Soumitra Chaterjee). The emotional entanglements are inevitable and natural, and Ray handles them deftly over the course of an over two-hour film. Ray was 82 at the time, and as steady as the film appears, it was not without tumult: the director suffered a heart attack during production.

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Enemy of the People (1989) is the weak link in the set, a didactic, wooden adaptation of a work by Henrik Ibsen. After his heart attack during the making of The Home and the World, doctors forbade him from making movies or operating a camera. After working on Indian television and on a documentary about his father, Ray’s return to serious film making came with doctor’s orders to shoot indoors and use static camera setups. Soumitra Chaterjee is again on board as a doctor who discovers his town’s water supply is contaminated. The static camera affects the film, but such limitations were used to fuller advantage in Ray’s final film a powerful study of deception and of film making, simple on the surface and accomplished on a low budget, but finely layered.

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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In The Stranger (1991), Anila Bose (Mamata Shankar) receives a letter that a long-lost uncle Manomohan Mitra (Utpal Dutt), who had left his family 35 years ago, is coming to visit. The prodigal uncle admits that he may as well be a stranger to his niece, but Anila is ready to welcome him as the real deal. Her husband Sudhindra (Deepankar De) is more skeptical. The film plays out on its interior sets like a play performed in he intimacy of your living room, Ray achieving a comfort with his actors that is a safe setting to depict the discomfort and uncertainty of this charming visitor of uncertain credentials. Beautifully shot and acted, The Stranger is a fine valedictory statement from one of the masters of cinema.

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Eclipse Series 40 - Late Ray [2014]

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The films of Ray may feel like homework a lot of the time (The Home and the World especially), but when it comes to great works of literature, great movies, and difficult challenges, I offer the following philosophy: Why the Hell not?

Crave Online

Though maybe not as well regarded or even known as the Bengali writer/director/composer's earlier films, the three movies represented in Late Ray: Eclipse Series 40 provide a respectable cap to the career of Satyajit Ray. Beginning with an elaborate period piece before sidling into more intimate dramas revolving around modern questions of cultural identity, Late Ray offers a quiet denouement to a personal career.

DVDtalk