The Middleman opens with a shot of a disinterested proctor monitoring the History final examination at Calcutta University. A student hides a note inside a cigarette box and passes it to Somnath (Pradip Mekherjee), who chooses not to participate in the rampant cheating, and passes on the note to his childhood friend, Sukumar (Gautam Chakravarti). […]
In 1942, at the height of the Second World War, Japan, having successfully secured and occupied Singapore, advanced the emperor’s ambitious military operation to India’s neighboring country of Burma. In response to the nation’s aggressive Asian campaign, the British sought to regain and reinforce strategic Allied positions in the Pacific by stemming the tide of […]
While not as overtly political as contemporary filmmaker Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray’s early 1970s films similarly capture the volatile climate of geopolitical unrest, profound social transformation, and domestic crisis stemming from the introduction of Naxalism into an increasingly radicalized Calcutta student movement. In a way, The Adversary represents this fomenting cultural revolution in its bracing […]
While the other two films in Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta trilogy – Pratidwandi (The Adversary) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman) – show the bleak prospects of college-educated young men struggling to carve out their own futures in the charged, sociopolitical climate of early 1970s Calcutta, the middle film in the trilogy, Seemabaddha (Company Limited) poses a […]
On the surface, Satyajit Ray’s diptych, Kapurush-o-Mahapurush (The Coward and The Holy Man) seems an unlikely pairing: one, a stranded screenwriter’s encounter with a lost love amidst the remote plantations of Darjeeling; the other, a hapless suitor’s attempts to wrest his beloved from the influence of a silver-tongued charlatan. But beyond the presence of a […]
Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee), or “Charu” as she is affectionately called, lives the privileged life of the Bengali upper class in the late nineteenth century. She is highly intelligent and creative, but her social status limits her opportunities for personal growth, and she is left with empty diversions that provide little challenge: embroidering handkerchiefs, managing the […]