Anjan Dutt 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

Calcutta, a huge city in India, is vastly overcrowded. Even those who are not desperately poor must limit their travel within the region, simply because of the difficulty of getting from one place to another. In this drama, two friends live on opposite sides of the city, and are unable to bridge the physical gap between them with any frequency, so they resort to telephone calls. A writer (Anjan Dutt) lives in a deteriorating but still stately mansion on one side of town, and his caller is a woman (Dimple Kapadia) who lives in a modern, airy apartment. They met on the phone by accident, when the insomniac woman put through a random call and chanced upon him. Their conversations studiously avoid personal information which would give either of them away, but eventually they break their own rules and the game they have been playing is ruined. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In this drama, a wealthy American doctor learns some important lessons about life in one of the poorest cities on Earth. Max Lowe (Patrick Swayze) is a Houston surgeon who has grown weary of the bureaucracy of American medicine. When he loses a patient on the operating table, Max impulsively decides to leave America and travel to India in the hope of "finding himself." Not long after he arrives in Calcutta, Max is attacked by a group of thugs and left without money or a passport. However, a man named Hasari (Om Puri) comes to Max's rescue. Hasari had left his farming community to come to the city, only to be overwhelmed by its dirt, crime, and overcrowding. Despite their poverty, Hasari and his family take Max in and bring him to a medical clinic in the City of Joy, one of the poorest slums in the city. The clinic is run by Joan Bethel (Pauline Collins), an Irish-American nun who urges Max to use his skills to help the people of Calcutta who so desperately need it. Max signs on, and he finds that the experience changes his life. City of Joy was based on a novel by Dominique Lapierre. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

In this 1983 Cannes entry, director Mrinal Sen has used a similar setting and theme as in his earlier Ekdin Pratidin. A lower middle-class couple with one child discovers that the house boy they hired from a peasant family left his damp sleeping place under the stairs one night to warm up in the lingering heat of the coal-fired oven in the kitchen and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The couple panic as the police start investigating the death, for the husband and wife know that the boy was not treated the same as their own child and are frightened lest the police bring charges against them or the peasant parents of the boy bring them to court for negligence. Their fears increase after the family comes for the body -- but the peasants are far from litigious or vindictive, and the husband and wife are left with their own thoughts as the family returns to their village in grief. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi