Also check out my Calcutta City Guide where I share some info on great single screens in Calcutta, seeing Bengali movies in Calcutta (with subtitles), and links to Roger Ebert's great writeups on going to a film fest in the city. And for those who want to delve deeper into the great Bengali culture, I also have reading and music recommendations.
I will begin with recommendations for Bengali films and then list some films from other languages set in the region. I also include some great old documentary footage of Calcutta.
I haven’t seen much Bengali cinema outside of Satyajit Ray and a few by his contemporary Ritwik Ghatak. I hope to see more, though I am sad to report that modern Bengali cinema seems fairly weak. Has any film industry in the world declined like the Bengali one has in the past half century? I watch tons of movie trailers from all over India, and a lot of films excite me, but I rarely see anything from Bengal that looks very good. Even the best looking ones generally look like “Oh, that looks like an okay movie to watch if I’m looking to watch a modern Bengali film” rather than something that really stands out. I’m sorry to be harsh, and I realize it is very unfair to make these judgments based on trailers rather than actual films, but these are my honest impressions, and this is the impression I get from critics as well. Unfortunately there are very few critics discussing contemporary Bengali cinema.
It hurts watching such mediocre looking Bengali trailers because…I feel like they should know better? Like I’ve sat through a large number of pretty horrendous movies in many different Indian languages, but in many cases the audience ate it up and it was clear to me that my standards of what constitutes good cinema is very different from the average Indian moviegoer, and I’m able to respect that. But Bengali cinema is different. Some of these bad looking movies are made by Satyajit Ray’s son! It’s just sad to see.
Anyway, on to my recommendations.
I’ll start with Ray’s films. A bit obvious, but I do highly recommend many of them, and even if you’ve seen a few you should see more. He has a wide range of films, covering many genres and settings, and I think it’s unfortunate that many western film fans hardly know him beyond his early work. The standard narrative considers him to be an art house filmmaker but I fear it puts people off from his work, and his films are mainstream and accessible. I’ve seen around half of his work, and at least as of a few years ago I believe I’ve seen all of them that have been restored. Many of the prints are excellent and are generally the best looking Indian movies available from their era, and I hope the rest of his catalogue gets decent restorations soon.
Of the films I’ve seen, I probably loved around a third of them, found another third to be pretty good, and found another third to be just okay, but I found nearly all of them to be worth watching and with great elements (whether it’s the visuals, the music often by Ray himself, interesting narrative/character/setting details, etc), with only one film standing out as a weak effort (the Ibsen adaptation Ganashatru, aka Enemy of the People, which feels made for TV, but I later learned it was made when he was sick and confined to a small studio space, in any case I still kinda liked that movie too). I say watch as many as you can, my favorites may or may not align with yours, and don’t be put off if you find some of the classics to be boring. I should note I'm bored by movies about kids in villages, and I find his Tagore adaptations to be dry.
My top five Ray, which I think will differ from most lists you see (in order of release):
Jalsaghar (The Music Room)
Mahanagar (The Big City)
Seemabaddha (Company Limited)
Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress)
Agantuk (The Stranger)
Of those, Seemabaddha and Mahanagar are the most Calcutta of them (of Ray’s “Calcutta Trilogy” I’ve only seen Seemabaddha, the good news is that there’s a new restoration of Pratidwandi which played at Cannes in 2022).
For more on Ray, check out what I wrote about his fiction in my Bengali literature section. I also really love Ray's poster design.
Other than Ray’s films, the only classic Bengali films I’ve seen are two by Ritwik Ghatak (I believe the only two that have been restored): Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star) and Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas). I have similar feelings on both films. I really loved the first halves, even had occasional crazy “This guy is better than Ray!” thoughts, but then both films fell apart in the second halves for me. In the case of Meghe Dhaka Tara, it was because it was too rushed, while Titas just lost me and I had a hard time keeping track of the characters (and since it’s fairly obscure there weren’t even online plot summaries). But I still highly recommend both of these! Ghatak’s filmmaking is more, uh, Indian than Ray’s, more melodramatic, but in a way it’s also more energetic and experimental, and he has incredibly striking visuals (check out the trailer for the great restorations). The stories are great too, even if they didn’t entirely work for me from start to finish. Meghe Dhaka Tara is in particular a good Calcutta film with its depiction of refugee camps for migrants from East Bengal. I would love to see more of his work and I hope more restorations come soon.
Beyond that, I don't have much to personally recommend, though I do have my database of Indian movies that have played in competition at the Big Three international film festivals: Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. I count 25 Bengali films (all but two of which were before the 1990s), and another 11 that played in some of the other sections at Cannes which I tracked as well (this is just looking at Indian films, there are also a few Bangladeshi films that I wrote about towards the end of that post). Outside of Ray's films, I don't think I've seen any of the movies on that list.
I have seen one film from Mrinal Sen, the most successful Bengali filmmaker on the international festival scene after Ray, though I didn't think all that much of the one I saw, the Hindi language Ek Din Achanak (which played at Venice ). I look forward to going through his works though. I’m not sure what the status is on restorations of his work.
Some other filmmakers who've had good success on the festival scene are Buddhadev Dasgupta and Goutam Ghose, unfortunately I haven't seen any of theirs.
Moving away from the international arthouse scene, one of the biggest names of in Bengali cinema is Aparna Sen. Her acclaimed early films seem good, her newer ones not so much. I only saw Arshinagar, which had some cinematically imaginative moments but was mostly just… loud, I thought. I haven’t seen any from the next waves of filmmakers like Rituparno Ghosh or Kaushik Ganguly but I look forward to checking out their work, with the earlier stuff looking more promising than the later stuff. Srijit Mukerji is one of the big names of the past few decades, some of his films, notably the early ones, seem compelling and he certainly has interesting taste, but the one I saw, Rajkahini, had ambition and a great idea but was just… loud. Here’s a top five list of his films, perhaps reliable since the writer agrees with me on Rajkahini, and it’s useful to have a best of list for Mukerji since he makes way too many films. My friend was in his film X=Prem playing a character named Charlie Kaufman, which is funny, but maybe a terrible, embarrassing note of self indulgence.
Are any of Sandip Ray’s movies good? Based on the trailers, I have my doubts about the new ones, but maybe the earlier ones? Uttoran played in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.
Q is the transgressive indie filmmaker of Bengal. I never bothered with his movies because I thought they seemed overindulgent and like they're trying too hard. I’ll watch one day, though.
The one current Bengali international arthouse success is Aditya Vikram Sengupta, his Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love) was an impressive work even if it wasn’t my thing, and I would love to see his Once Upon a Time in Calcutta, which played in the Horizons section at Venice and looks more interesting to me.
That’s my rundown of Bengali cinema of the past half century. I do wish I’ve seen more. Though it's sad how it's declined, suppose there is at least one really good Bengali film totally worth watching every two years (which seems reasonable to expect), that’s at least 15 really good films worth watching of the past 30 years, and I don’t think I know a single person who’s seen 15 Bengali films from the past 30 years, so we can all do better and watch more Bengali films.
Here’s a list of 20 supposedly good Bengali films from 2000-2019. I watched trailers for all of them that I could find and they generally looked pretty good, but it did strike me how much better the older films on the list looked than the newer films!
I did see three Bengali movies when I was in Calcutta, and I think I got lucky because they were all quite good! They were, for the record:
Ballabhpurer Roopkotha - A very fun ghost comedy about the faded glories of zamindari families, my favorite subject, like The Music Room meets Ghostbusters (okay, not really). Based on a play by Badal Sarkar, apparently a theater icon known for political works, but this is one of his few straight up crowd pleasing entertainments, and it’s funny and cleverly constructed. I kept thinking about how much better the movie could have been if it were more tightly edited, but it is still a lot of fun, I recommend it. It's not saying much but this is my favorite modern Bengali film I’ve seen.
Dostojee - Well made poor kids in a village drama, good enough to play at film fests, not the sort of thing that excites me, but good.
Hawa - Bangladeshi film, interesting setup, great visuals, unique, lots of interesting details. The story lost my interest as it went on, but overall worth watching. Does Dhaka make better films than Calcutta? What’s going on here?
Non-Bengali Films Set In Calcutta
While Bengali cinema has declined, a number of the top Hindi filmmakers today are Bengali, and they’ve made some strong films set in Calcutta. In a way, these are better Calcutta movies than most Bengali films set there because they have a romantic view of the city rather than a matter of fact view. The obvious recent examples are Kahaani (from Sujoy Ghosh), Detective Byomkesh Bakshy (my favorite of these, by Dibakar Banerjee, a rare great urban period piece in Indian cinema), and Piku (by Shoojit Sircar). I really like and recommend all of these (I wonder if they’ve ever considered doing films in Bengali?).
Other recent Hindi films that come to mind are Mani Ratnam’s Yuva (I thought it was very good when I saw it a decade ago but don’t remember it), Pradeep Sarkar/VVC’s Parineeta (entertaining and has strong elements though I felt it was too much of a mixed bag…a great, beautifully shot tour of the city though and I think most people will like it, as I did), and Bhansali’s Devdas (I surprisingly haven’t seen it). There are the classic Bimal Roy versions of Devdas and Parineeta as well as other films by Roy (I haven’t seen any). Sujoy Ghosh recommends Roy’s Naukari, Ghosh’s own production Te3n, and most interestingly the Tamil film Mahanadi (I haven’t seen any of these either, or the film Howrah Bridge, one more classic that comes to mind).
I don’t think I’ve seen any of the non-Indian films set in Calcutta. The famous ones don’t seem that interesting to me (namely City of Joy and Lion, though I suspect City of Joy is worth watching for some well photographed visuals of the city from the 80s), but I am curious about The Bengali Night which was written by Jean-Claude Carrière, stars Hugh Grant, and was shot at a rajbari, all of which makes it worth watching to me even though the one review I could find is negative. Also curious about the French film India Song, by the famous French novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, and its odd sounding companion film/sequel.
There’s also the 1947 noir film Calcutta, which was obviously not shot there and seems to have little local color, but it looks like a fun curiosity. It’s directed by John Farrow (Mia’s dad) who also made Reno (1939), China (1943), and California (1947). The latter was with the same screenwriter as Calcutta, and he went on to write a film called Singapore (1947) as well as its later remake Istanbul (1957). Those were the days! (Casablanca was a hit, so why not.)
Anything I’m missing here?
(I once had a dream the movie Black Adam was set in Calcutta. I don’t know what Black Adam is despite seeing the trailer five times in the month before I went to Calcutta, and in the dream he was from the heavens and grew up watching gods battling, but after he was exiled to earth he was endlessly bored by puny humans and their petty squabbles, only to take solace in the chaos and squalor of Calcutta. This sounds kinda good, probably better than the real thing!) By the way, some fans of the great American film and television actor Rick Dalton may have wondered, as I did, who the Bengal Lancers were. There are a bunch of regiments. It’s not that interesting to me, so not much more to say. There was a popular movie The Lives of a Bengal Lancer which I’ll have to check out. The book it is based on sounds good. There was also a TV show Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers, described as an “eastern.”
For documentary footage, I highly recommend Louis Malle’s Calcutta. Many Indians hated it and considered it to be poverty porn, which is accurate, but half a century later it stands as the best footage of Calcutta from its era and that in itself is something special. The footage is really amazing, great quality restorations, find it on the Criterion Channel or wherever else you can find the good print and don’t watch it on Youtube.
The BFI also has some great documentary footage of the city, see here and here, and there’s more if you search their page of things like horseraces, garden parties, pageants, etc.
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