Teen Kanya

I have been a fan of Ray for a long time and I have seen most of his famous films. This film was not available for some time because the quality of the film was deteriorating so badly that they had to restore the entire film. Originally made with three entirely unrelated short stories by Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, the restored version has only two stories of the original three. In both the stories Postmaster and Samapti you will find the inimitable Ray touch. You can see the same neo realistic portrayal of simple lives and events of ordinary people. Postmaster evokes a feeling of pity for the young girl, but at the same time it seems to reflect the strength and courage of ordinary people going about their lives. The second story "samapti", though not as tight as the first (it winds around a bit before it reaches a climactic finish) again pours life into a simple story about a young girl who is reluctant to let go of her childhood and who is pushed into the world of adulthood. Aparna Sen ( Ray finds such beautiful women to play in his movies) plays this part brilliantly. The picturisque Bengal country side comes to life in this colourful black and white film. A must see for anyone who likes films.

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.

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.)

In the year of Tagore's centenary, Ray made a documentary about him, and this anthology. Based on three short stories of Tagore, for which he should have got another Nobel Prize I think, the titular women are the central character of the stories. All shot in wide angle cameras, these stories are mostly filmed in rural bengal and the beauty of it enhances through the lens. And speaking about beauty, all the main mans - oops, womans - here successfully make us cry, scared or giggly, accordingly to the different genres of the short films in it. Eventually we will get better supporting characters and awesome ensemble in Ray's films, but this should be noted for writing so much strong and prominent non-lead characters in it.

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.