Teen Kanya

Teen Kanya / Three Daughters (1961) : Brief Review -

A Classic Poetic and Artistic Woman oriented Anthology by Satyajit Ray. I never knew that Indian Cinema has seen Anthology during 60s decade (please spare me if I'm wrong) before modern filmmaking got recognition in India. So, this idea of making Anthology in early 60s had already left stunned and additionally it has 3 wonderful stories to tell and every single one has got a powerful storyline. Based on popular Indian stories of the great writer Rabindranath Tagore, these short films reveal definitive moments in the lives of three young girls. First is The Postmaster, a story of a pre-adolescent orphan girl who shares a warm bond with the new postmaster who teaches her to write and read. This story ends on such a heart-wrenching note that will definitely leave you dazed. The second one is kind of psychological drama of a married woman who is obsessed with Jewels and her husband who is desperate to get loved by her. This one is titled Monihara and it's very gripping and thrilling ride. The final one is Samapti. Mrinmoyee, a funky teenage girl is married against her choice to a good fella Amu. After marriage she disown this relationship but when husband goes away, she realises the real meaning of Husband-Wife's relationship. If i have to rank these 3 quality wise, then The Postmaster will top the list. Sampati and Monihara to be be followed. Acting, writing, execution and cinematography everything is absolutely Classy. Hats off to Satyajit Ray for giving that much needed experimental Cinematic Classic to Indian Cinema even before Indian Cinema was ready to accept it. This is Indian Cinema's answer to Hollywood filmmaking that how to create a Magical Classic Film out of simple short stories. Overall, a Cult that started another new wave in Indian Cinema.

RATING - 8/10*

By - #samthebestest.

This film, called TEEN KANYA in Bengali and TWO DAUGHTERS in English, was made six years after Ray's first film, PATHER PANCHALI (1955), which was the first of the famous APU TRILOGY. Having finished that trilogy as well as another of his haunting masterpieces, THE MUSIC ROOM, Ray turned his attention to two wonderful short stories by Rabindranath Tagore, so that this film is therefore a diptych, composed of two separate films of those two stories. The first of them is entitled THE POSTMASTER, and most of it is filmed in and around a small hut inhabited by a young man who has just become a village postmaster. Along with the hut and the job, he has acquired a servant named Ratan who is a 10 year-old orphan girl who never knew her mother and father. The previous postmaster beat her and treated her badly, but the new one is very kind, and she becomes attached to him. This is the first time she has ever allowed herself to feel anything for anyone, in her harsh young life. The story is one of the saddest and most heart-breaking ever filmed. The intensity of the acting by the young girl, played by Chandana Banerjee, is one of the most powerful child screen performances in the history of world cinema. This young girl only made one other film, KAA, in 1966, and after that, nothing is recorded of her life or her fate. She was able to convey so much with her eyes without speaking, that it was like cinematic telepathy. The ending of this film is unforgettable, and will haunt any sensitive person always. The second film is not a sad story but an odd and amusing one. It concerns a girl in her late teens who is a wildly eccentric tomboy. She and her family live in a shack by the river bank, having lost their home and all their possessions in one of the many floods which continually afflict Bengal (the stories are set in Bengal). She likes to run wild and free, swing from the trees, play with the boys, run and hide in the forest, and always goes barefoot. She is brilliantly played by the young actress Aparna Sen, whose first adult part it was (she had appeared in one film previously as a child). She went on to become one of India's most famous serious film actresses, and has appeared in 62 films, including others by Satyajit Ray such as DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST (1970) and THE MIDDLEMAN (1976). She also appeared in James Ivory's THE GURU (1969) with Michael York and Rita Tushingham, as well as James Ivory's BOMBAY TALKIE (1970) with Felicity Kendal. In this film, Sen evokes the mystery and the animal energy of the wild young creature in an unforgettable portrayal of a girl in rebellion at becoming a woman and a wife and thus forfeiting her freedom. These days the film should be adopted by feminists as a manifesto statement. Satyajit Ray was notable for making many films sympathetic to women, girls, and children, and he had a rare understanding of the vagaries of feminine psychology. His films are often as much psychology lessons as they are high art. And he had the ability to get his actors and actresses to give of their best, and then more besides. Certainly, Ray's films are some of the most emotionally moving and psychologically profound works of cinema ever made. But in addition to that, they are technical masterpieces as well. For this film, Ray was director, producer, writer, and composer of the music. Ray was certainly one of the three great Bengali geniuses of the 20th century, another being Rabindranath Tagore himself, and the third being unquestionably Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the scientist who collaborated with Albert Einstein, and after whom Bose-Einstein Condensates are named. (But if you have never heard of Bose-Einstein Condensates, you are forgiven, as they are highly technical, and even most physicists have never heard of them.)

Originally, this movie comprised _three_ separate stories by the legendary Rabindranath Thakur (Tagore); hence the title "Teen Kanya" ("Three Daughters"). However, the subtitling could not be finished in time for a Tagore anniversary, so the middle story, a ghost story, is not included in the videocassette, retitled "Two Daughters." In the two remaining stories, we explore the lives of two girls living in a world not of their making, facing their fates with limited options. The first story, "The Postman," is about a lower-middle-class bourgeois city boy who goes deep into the Bengali countryside to take a job as a village postman. The "daughter" in this story is Ratna (nicknamed "Ratan"), his servant, a little slip of a girl. In the west, this girl, an orphan, not even at the age of adolescence, is a child. How can she cope? What can she look forward to? The second story, "Samapti," is about another girl in rural Bengal, this one a little older. She's what we would call a "tomboy." The life of an adult woman in this society -- a housewife -- wouldn't seem to be much in her taste. She is active, vivacious, lively, brazen, playful. She is known as "Pagli" ("crazy") by the disapproving villagers. But it is these very qualities that attract the attention of Amulya, a young college graduate who has returned home to his widowed mother to be nagged by her to settle down and take a wife -- a traditional, shy, modest, and, in Amulya's view, boring wife. Despite the serious subject of these two stories, they are actually quite funny. The second story is even hilarious, with a couple of near-slapstick sequences. (In the scene in which Amulya breaks the news to his mother as to which girl he really likes, pay close attention to what's happening in the background.)

Two daughters by Satyajit Ray was my first introduction to Indian cinema. Satyajit Ray has produced a gem of a movie that differs from almost any other Indian films I have seen. Two daughters actually consists of two separate stories based on stories written by Rabindranath Tagore.

The Postman is the better of the two stories. Not giving away the plot, this movie had one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in cinema. The simple, but powerful way Ray pulls his quiet films together at their end makes these quiet films very memorable. Sampati drags out somewhat longer, but has a powerful climax of its own. After years, these two movies have stuck in my memory. I would recommend them to anyone.

A collection of three stories originally written by Rabindranath Tagore, and adapted here by Satyajit Ray. I don't know if there was meant to be a common theme, but each portrays a girl's relationship to a young man and their primary desire in life. (I say 'girl' but in the middle story, the main character is a woman). One wants to learn from a father figure, another has a burning desire for riches, and the last has a fierce need for independence. Tension results when those desires are threatened. The stories are simply told which suits them well, and while the quality of the print that I saw wasn't the highest, the quality of the filmmaking is solid, blending solid cinematography and great music into stories that touch various emotions.

The Postmaster has a young man coming to a small village from Calcutta to take the job of a postmaster, and there befriending his servant, an orphan girl. In addition to all her chores she helps him deal with a local madman, as well as nurses him back to health when he contracts malaria. Meanwhile, he begins teaching her how to read and write Bengali. It's a story about the pain of separating from someone you've been touched by, echoed in the lyrics of the traditional music some of the old men play one night. Ray gives us a very nice scene when the young girl comes to the postmaster at night during his sickness, and he doesn't recognize her; the way it's shot, she almost seems otherworldly. It's the feeling of this one that delivers the biggest impact though, so touching, and so true to how things often go in life.

Monihara (Lost Jewels) is about a wife who covets jewelry above all else, and continually gets her husband to buy her a piece here or there. When his business suffers from a fire, she worries that he will need to take some of it back, and flees with the help of a cousin. The framing to the story has an author talking to a robed man who faces away from him and speaks as if he's disembodied, setting a ghostly tone, and throughout the film we get the feeling that there is something supernatural going on. For example, when the man approaches his wife from behind as she stares out the window of the mansion they've inherited, Ray moves the camera slowly to the sound of eerie music, a fantastic scene. I absolutely loved the soundtrack which Ray also scored. It's spooky and foreboding, and reflects the sickness of greed and this couple's broken relationship perfectly.

The wife (Kanika Majumdar) gets a chance to sing of longing and melancholy; she's a beautiful woman with a wonderful voice, and it's too bad her character is such a shallow person. We get the idea from the author that if her husband was more forceful, she would love and respect him more. "He didn't realize that in matters of the heart, it's brute force, not meek reticence which really works. A woman prefers the harsher things, like sour green mango and hot chilies," he tells us. While that's pretty direct, I liked how the narrative didn't explicitly inform us exactly what happens to her after she leaves, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks. It's just a lovely, haunting little story.

The last story, Samapti (The Conclusion) has a young man returning home after his exams, only to have his mother begin pushing him to get married. She arranges things with the daughter of friends of the family, but the trouble is, he doesn't feel anything for her. Instead, he finds himself drawn to a young girl who runs around the village and gets up to various mischief, an independent free spirit who is so counter to the social convention that she's referred to as "Crazy Girl." Against his mother's wishes (and the girl's too) he arranges to marry her, not realizing that the thing that draws him to her is the very thing that will make having her settle down into the role of a wife so difficult. It's like putting a bird in a cage. I love the defiance of the girl (Aparna Sen) and the tension with her husband (Soumitra Chatterjee), though this one did seem to lag a bit, and the ending seemed a bit too cheery, perhaps to compensate for the other stories.

Overall, a good collection, and worth seeing.