Nine moments from Ray’s cinema that I return to again and again 1. When Arati’s (Madhabi Mukherjee’s) colleague Edith (Vicky Redmond ) teaches her to apply lipstick in the office bathroom in Mahanagar. The mirror catches the unexpected friendship between a Bhadralok school master’s daughter-in-law on her first job and the ‘smart’Anglo-Indian ‘office girl’ 2. When Shamalendu (Barun Chanda) offers…
Tag: Soumitra Chatterjee
Indian cinema legend Soumitra Chatterjee’s death spotlights end of art film era
Chatterjee worked closely with late Oscar-winning director Satyajit Ray, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Worked his entire life in the Bengali film industry, eschewing the more lucrative Bollywood Noted Hollywood director Martin Scorsese once said the four most influential auteurs of the 20th century were India’s Satyajit Ray, Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, Italy’s Frederico Fellini and…
Kshudito Pashan: A Ghost Story with a Hindustani Classical Soundtrack
Although the Tagore story is based on the Victorian imported template, the score by Ustad Ali Akbar Khan uses none of the jump scares and creaks typical of the genre I had seen Lekin many years before I came to Kshudito Pashan, the Bengali film from which it is said to be inspired. I knew it has the template of…
Asukh: A Father-Daughter Chamber Drama with Bowel Movement Talk at Dinner
A decade and a half before the Hindi film Piku, this Bengali feature offered the gender opposite of the mother-daughter drama, the Autumn Sonata, Unishe April, Tehzeeb genre As much as I love Piku, there is a father-daughter film with similar strains but darker in its comic and emotional notes that arrived a decade and a half before it. Asukh…