Friday, April 29, 2011

Best 5 Movies of Director : Mrinal Sen

1. Baishey Shravana (1960)

Drama

The time is immediately before World War II. The place a remote village in Bengal. Priyanath, a middle aged man and the last offspring of a once wealthy family, gets married to a lovely teenage girl to please his widowed mother. Overcoming the initial inhibitions, he starts enjoying the happiness of a normal married life.
Life continues to be a struggle for Priyanath. He earns a livelihood by hawking motley wares in the local trains. One day, when he is away with his wife Malati to a village fair, a violent storm brings down the roof in his mother’s room and kills her. Priyanath loses his job too for not keeping up with the younger hawkers. The couple is exposed to the events happening outside. The war comes and brings famine in its wake. There is a mass exodus from the village but Priyanath refuses to leave his home.
After three days of starvation, one day, when Priyanath finally manages to get some rice, he eats his food with an animal like greed without leaving anything for his wife. Malati can stand starvation, but cannot accept her husband’s new selfishness. Their relationship gets increasingly embittered. After another confrontation, Priyanath leaves home and finds his wife dead on return.

Cast

  Gyanesh Mukherjee   
  Madhabi Mukherjee   
  Hemangini Devi   
  Umanath Bhattacharya   
  Sumita Dasgupta   
  Anup Kumar   
  Rajyalakshmi   
  Asha Devi   
  Bharati Bannerjee 





2. Bhuvan Shome (1969)

Drama

Bhuvan Shome is a lonely widower, a proud old man and a strict disciplinarian. Looking back on the trodden path, strewn with staunch determination and drab attitudes, Bhuvan Shome, a throughtly unenchanted man, seeks escape in a holiday. Off to duck shooting in Gujarat, Bhuvan Shome little ralises that the rejuvenation adventure would hurl him into a world so apart that he would find it the most joyful experience in his life. His new world consists of simple, uninitiated village folks, a bullock-cart drive, marauding buffalo and Gouri. In Gouri, Bhuvan Shome finds a fresh, throbbing pulse in a dying world. And suddenly everything lights up, perhaps heightening his sense of isolation, in his new found joy.

Cast

  Amitabh Bachchan  ...  Commentator (voice) (as Amitabh) 
  Utpal Dutt  ...  Bhuvan Shome 
  Suhasini Mulay  ...  Gauri 
  Shekhar Chatterjee   
  Sadhu Meher  ...  Jadhav Patel 
  Punya Das   
  Rochak Pandit 





3. Interview (1970)

Drama

Ranjit Mullick is a smart personable young man. A friend of the family, who works in a foreign firm, has assured him of a lucrative job in his firm. All Ranjit has to do is to appear in an interview, dressed in a western style suit.
It seems a simple task, but fate wills otherwise. A strike by a labour Union means that he can't get his suit back from the laundry. His father's old suit won't fit him. He borrows a suit but loses it in a fracas. Ultimately he has to go to the interview dressed in the traditional Bengali Dhoti and Kurta (Dhuti-Panjabi).
This film is considered to be the first film of Mrinal Sen's Calcutta trilogy, the others being Calcutta 71, and Padatik.

Cast

 Karuna Bannerjee  
 Ranjit Mullik ...  Ranjit





4. Khandhar (1984)

Drama

Three friends from the city visit some ruins where an aged mother (Gita Sen) and her daughter Jamini (Shabana Azmi) live. Mother awaits the arrival of a distant cousin to marry Jamini but the man is already married and living in Calcutta. The photographer Subhash (Naseeruddin Shah) takes pity on the family and pretends to be the awaited suitor. The mother dies contented but when the threesome leave again, Jamini stays behind facing a life of loneliness in the ruins. The movie is based on a short story of Prememdra Mitra, noted author, film director and film producer, called 'Telenapota Abiskar' (Discovering Telenapota).


Cast
  Shabana
 Azmi  ...  Jamini 
  Annu Kapoor  ...  Anil 
  Pankaj Kapur  ...  Dipu 
  Sreela Majumdar   
  Gita Sen  ...  The mother 
  Naseeruddin Shah  ...  Subhash 
  Rajen Tarafder 





5. Kharij (1982)
Kharij
Drama
Kharij opens with a sequence where a small child comes to work in the household of a middle-class family. The couple are both working, and have a small lovable child. A few sequences later, the scene of action moves to the kitchen. The kitchen is locked from inside. The previous night, the servant had gone to sleep in the kitchen ( usually he sleeps in the basement of the house) and is not answering the frantic calls of his master and other members of the household. After trying for quite a while, the door is broken and the boy is found to be lying in an unconscious state. The doctor is called, who announces the child to be dead. As it is a case of unnatural death, the police is called. By now, inquisitive neighbors have already got wind of the incident, and have converged as a crowd in front of the couple's residence. Some sympathetic neighbors comes to help the couple in this crisis. Police arrives and takes stock of the situation. They conduct their routine investigations, and takes the body of the boy for "postmortem." The husband will have to report to Police Station in the evenings. A helpful neighbor, sensing it to be a complicated case, advises the husband to consult a reputed lawyer to prevent him from getting implicated in legal wrangling. When the husband goes to the lawyer, the lawyer exposes the husband's false claims of treating the servant-boy as one of their family members.
When the deceased boy's father comes to the couple's house to take his son's monthly salary, he receives the shattering news of his son's demise from the other small boy working in the household. When the couple actually goes to meet the servant's father, the man breaks down and naturally, is inconsolable. Some of the sequences are indeed very touching. When the deceased boy's father has to stay that night in the couple's house, the couple sets up a nice bed for him at night, full of warm quilt and thick mattresses. However, the boy's father's sentiments prevented him from availing of such luxury, and he said that he would like to sleep in the kitchen where his son was found dead sleeping.
Post-mortem gives verdict that the boy has died from carbon-monoxide formation. The boy had gone to a late night film show the previous night, and returned around midnight to the house. When he felt that it was cold, he went to sleep in the kitchen (normally he slept in the basement). There was no ventilation in the kitchen room, and the charcoal cooking item was dimly burning. Ignorant of the perils of sleeping without proper ventilation, the servant succumbs in his sleep. After the postmortem report, the boy is taken to the burning Ghat and set aflame.
The denouement sees the hapless father finally asking permission from the couple to return to his home in the village.

Cast

  Anjan Dutt  ...  Anjan Sen 
  Mamata Shankar  ...  Mamata Sen 
  Sreela Majumdar  ...  Sreeja 
  Indranil Moitra  ...  Pupai 
  Dehapratim Das Gupta  ...  Hari 
  Nilotpal Dey  ...  Inspector 
  Charuprakash Ghosh  ...  Lawyer 
  Debatosh Ghosh   
  Gita Sen  ...  Helpful neighbor 
  Sunil Mukherjee  ...  Curious neighborhood onlooker 
  Bimal Chatterjee   
  Ramen Roy Chowdhuri   
  Binoy Laturi 

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