Trois femmes

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 Originally made with three entirely unrelated short stories by Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, the restored version has only two stories of the original three.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.

Like most anthology films this one from Satyajit Ray, which has as its common theme womans' travails in early 20th century India and based on stories by Rabindranath Tagore, has entries of varying quality. The first, dealing with a stray waif who keeps body and soul together by acting as a servant to the postmaster of a poor village and becomes attached to him as a father figure only to be abandoned when the postmaster returns to Calcutta, is affecting mostly due to the wonderful performance given by the child actor; heart tugging without being cloying. Not easy to do, even with an accomplished adult actor, so credit Ray along with the kid. Problem with it is that it's not long enough (certainly not a flaw often seen in this director's work!). Just when you're starting to see a relationship build between the child and the adult the plug is pulled. Consequently, what should be a heart rending denouement is, at best, bittersweet.

Second entry about an upper middle class woman's marital problems is so dull I wish it were half the length of the first.

Third entry is the best, by far. A triangle between a too controlling mother, her spoiled son, and the "headstrong, crazy" girl (read a woman with a mind of her own) with whom the son is infatuated, the story is well told by Ray with a beguiling combination of comedy and tragedy. And the ending, where both the son and the girl learn to grow up, in their various ways, if they wish to salvage their marriage, is most satisfying.

First film: B Second Film: C Third Film: A

Ergo, let's give it a B.

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.)

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.)