DVD Release: Eclipse Series 40: Late Ray

DVD Release Date: Jan. 7, 2014
Price: DVD $44.95
Studio: Criterion

The films directed by the great Satyajit Ray (Charulata) of India in the last ten years of his life have a unique dignity and drama. Three of them are presented in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 40: Late Ray collection: the fervent Rabindranath Tagore adaptation The Home and the World; the vital Henrik Ibsen–inspired An Enemy of the People; and the filmmaker’s final film, the poignant and philosophical family story The Stranger. Each is a complex, political, and humane portrait of a world both corrupt and indescribably beautiful, constructed with Ray’s characteristic elegance and imbued with autumnal profundity.

Swatilekha Chatterjee stars in Satyajit Ray's 1984 film The Home and The World.

All three films are presented in Bengali with English subtitles.

Here’s a closer look at them:

The Home and The World (1984)
Both a romantic triangle tale and a philosophical take on violence in times of revolution, The Home and the World, set in early twentieth-century Bengal, concerns an aristocratic but progressive man who, in insisting on broadening his more traditional wife’s political horizons, drives her into the arms of his more radical school chum. Ray had wanted to adapt Rabindranath Tagore’s classic novel to the screen for decades.

An Enemy of the People (1989)
In this absorbing contemporary adaptation of a play by Henrik Ibsen, a good-hearted doctor discovers that the serious illness befalling the citizens of his small Bengali town may be due to a contamination of the water at the local temple. His findings are met not with public gratitude but with rancor, along with opposition from local authorities, who are afraid the news will keep visitors away.

The Stranger (1991)
Ray’s valedictory film is a multifaceted character study that contains both light humor and melancholy rumination. Written by the filmmaker, it involves a bourgeois couple who are bemused by the news that a man claiming to be the wife’s long-lost uncle will be coming to stay with them after years of travel. Though they fear he’s an impostor, they tentatively let the man into their home, commencing an eye-opening emotional journey for the family.

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