Soumitra Chatterjee Movies

Two young men find themselves dealing with the ins and outs of Bengali culture on different sides of the globe in this comedy-drama from Indian filmmaker Anjan Dutt. Apu (Parambrata Chatterjee) is a successful computer technician who is looking for greater career opportunities, and decides to leave his home to move to Texas. Apu's family is nonplussed, and his girlfriend Sheela (Raima Sen) makes his clear she has no interest in joining him, so he flies to America to start a new life on his own. Apu has trouble adapting to life on and off the job in Houston, his new romance with Rita (Peeya Rai Chowdhary), the daughter of a wealthy expatriate family, runs into more than a few rough patches, and Hasan (Shauvik Kundagrami), Apu's new best friend, seems to be having even more trouble adjusting to American life than he is. Meanwhile, Andy (Shayan Munshi), a musician of Indian descent who was born and raised in New York City, comes to India for the first time to visit his grandfather. While Andy imagined he knew what India would be like, his assumptions go out the window once he arrives, and his downtown sense of cool begins to fail him when he falls for a beautiful woman he meets in Kolkata -- Sheela. The Bong Connection was screened in competition at the 2006 Dubai Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Directed by Goutam Ghose, Abar Arannye (In the Forest...Again) follows a group of four middle-class young men on a weeklong vacation from everyday life. Based on characters in Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest, the group consists of Ashim Chatterjee (Soumitra Chatterjee), his wife Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), their grown children, and one of their children's friends. A second family accompanies them, and a third individual goes along, as well, despite having been weakened by cancer. The trip, which they had taken as children, is meant as a tribute to their pasts. The innocence of their youth, however, looks unlikely to re-emerge after one of the group goes missing in what is believed to be a political statement of some sort. ~ Tracie Cooper, Rovi

Centering on the often strained friendship between Sanaka (writer and director Aparna Sen) and her daughter-in-law Paromita (Rituparna Sengupta) over the course of 14 years, House of Memories is set at the former's spacious house in North Calcutta. Among the challenges the two endure are Sanaka's schizophrenic daughter Khuku (Sailee Sengupta), the wreckage of Paromita's marriage after she gives birth to a boy with cerebral palsy, and the death of Sanaka's own husband. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi

This Indian drama offers a subtle examination of urban values and of the struggles of peasants to survive. The story is centered around a wealthy Calcutta physician, Dr. Nihar Sengupta who deals exclusively with wealthy patients. He has lost touch with his former values and ignores his wife's fears that their daughter has become a druggie. His life changes when he sets off on a seven hour drive to present an academic paper at a Rotary Club meeting. His car gets a flat tire on the outskirts of a rural village. As his chauffeur changes the tire, Dr. Sengupta hears someone groaning in the nearby weeds. He finds a sick man on the cusp of death. He has been there for two days and seems to have pneumonia. With little compassion, Sengupta takes him to the village and leaves him at the mercy of the village witch doctor who will later attempt to "exorcise" the sickness from the man's body. After a while, Sengupta starts thinking about his callousness. He becomes guilt-ridden and goes back to save the patient from the witch doctor's ministrations. The next morning Sengupta returns again, but this time he is too late. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

This bittersweet story is one of the last two films directed by acclaimed Bengali Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). In the story, Probodh (Haradhan Banerjee) is the very moral and upright 70-year-old patriarch of a family, with four grown sons. His father and one of his sons live at home with him, and his other three sons live elsewhere. When he collapses during a banquet being given in his honor, the sons and their families gather at his bedside at home. There, while their father lies for the most part comatose, only rousing occasionally to deliver cryptic messages, the boys reveal to each other exactly what they've been up to without the sugar coating they've been giving their father. The oldest boy has been embezzling from the company he runs, another one is losing money for fun at the racetrack, and yet another has given up a decent job in order to become an actor. As they quarrel with one another, they are not aware that their father has been taking much of this in. Gradually, the old man recovers, a little wiser perhaps, and certainly sadder. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Gurudas (Soumitra Chatterjee) is a schoolteacher in rural Bengal in this educational drama set in the 1930s. Normally a teacher of Sanskrit, he is called on to teach Bengali literature one day. The experience convinces him of the need for a comprehensive Bengali dictionary, and Gurudas begins the task. As he compiles the massive amount of information, he labors without pay for years and suffers innumerable personal tragedies, like the death of his daughter. He is forced to spend his own money on the printing, loses his house, and is soon impoverished and abandoned by his family. Grateful officials find the aging and cynical Gurudas years later living in squalor when they try to salute him for his efforts. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Released in India as Ghare Baire, Home and the World offers a rare collaboration between that country's top director Satyajit Ray and versatile Indian film-personality Victor Banerjee. The latter plays a well-educated Hindu living in colonial East Bengal in 1908. When British governor-general Lord Curzon deliberately foments unrest between the Hindus and the Muslims in order to solidify his own power, Banerjee's best friend Soumitra Chatterjee tries to organize his countrymen into a rebellion. Banerjee introduces his wife Swatilekha Chatterjee to his charismatic rebel friend, hoping in this way to test his wife's love. Her attraction to the rebel is but one of the many wedges, both personal and political, driven between the two friends as Hindu/Muslim tensions flare up. Based on a 1919 novel by poet Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World had long been a pet project of Satyajit Ray's, but he'd been unable to bring the book to the screen until India's political climate allowed him to do so. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Felu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is a detective whose vacation is interrupted when a priceless statue of an elephant god is stolen. Suspects include a local gangster, a nervous bodyguard, a disgruntled servant, and a fence who masquerades as a holy man. Chatterjee plays the character with reserve and occasional humor in this twisting detective story written and directed by Satyajit Ray. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Satyajit Ray's drama about the Bengal famine of 1942-1943 stars frequent Ray collaborator Soumitra Chatterjee as Gangacharan, a Brahmin who sets up a school in a remote Bengali village. As World War II drains India's resources, the price of rice begins to rise, and soon the villagers can no longer afford to eat. Merchants horde their grain and the impoverished villagers riot in protest. Gangacharan manages to survive for a while by exchanging his teaching services for food, but the devastation around him soon becomes so desperate that his altruism overcomes his instinct for self-preservation. ~ Tom Vick, Rovi

This short feature by Satyajit Ray, based on a story by Premendra Mitra, stars Soumitra Chatterjee as Amitabha Roy, a Calcutta screenwriter whose car breaks down during a research trip out in the country. A local tea baron offers him a place to stay for the night, and Amitabha is surprised to find that the baron's wife, Karuna (Madhabi Mukherjee), is the woman he had been in love with years before, and lost because of his own indecisiveness. Amitabha realizes that he is still in love with her, and spends the evening and much of the next day trying to steal moments alone with her to find out what she sees in her boorish husband, and talk her into leaving him. But Karuna remains tauntingly enigmatic until the end. The Coward is often shown with another short Ray feature, The Holy Man. ~ Tom Vick, Rovi

The "third daughter" in this excellent, intended trilogy by acclaimed Indian director Satyajit Ray got axed in the final cut when Ray decided to keep his film at its current 116 minutes. The first story in the set, both based on tales by Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore is titled "The Postmaster" and relates how Ratan (Chandana Bannerjee) an orphan, is befriended by a Calcutta poet, Nandalal (Anil Chatterjee), when he comes to Ratan's remote village to take over the postmaster's job and hires her as a servant girl. His kindness extends to teaching her to read and write and she, in turn, is devoted to him. Faced with the difficulties of living in abject poverty, the postmaster has to choose between staying with Ratan or returning to the city. In the second story, "Samapti" or alternately, "The Conclusion," a student returns home from law school to discover that his overbearing mother has arranged a marriage for him with a local woman from a respectable family. Rebelling against this traditional custom, the young man decides to marry the tomboy he loves, with interesting results. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi