The Eclipse Series

[pro-bassoonist]

The films directed by the great Satyajit Ray in the last ten years of his life have a unique dignity and drama. Three of them are collected here: the fervent Rabindranath Tagore adaptation The Home and the World; the vital Henrik Ibsen–inspired An Enemy of the People; and the filmmaker’s final film, the poignant and philosophical family story The Stranger. Each is a complex, political, and humane portrait of a world both corrupt and indescribably beautiful, constructed with Ray’s characteristic elegance and imbued with autumnal profundity. These late-career features are the meditative works of a master.

The Home and the World
Satyajit Ray 1984

The Home and the World, set in early twentieth-century Bengal, concerns an aristocratic but progressive man who, in insisting on broadening his more traditional wife’s political horizons, drives her into the arms of his more radical school chum.

An Enemy of the People
Satyajit Ray 1989

In Satyajit Ray’s absorbing contemporary adaptation of a play by Henrik Ibsen, a good-hearted doctor discovers that the serious illness befalling the citizens of his small Bengali town may be due to a contamination of the water at the local temple.

The Stranger
Satyajit Ray 1991

Written by the filmmaker, The Stranger involves a bourgeois couple who are bemused by the news that a man claiming to be the wife’s long-lost uncle will be coming to stay with them after years of travel.

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