Late Ray

Late Ray features the DVD debuts of three films hailing from the twilight of Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's brilliant career. Most notable is 1984's The Home and the World, a profoundly moving adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore's 1916 same-titled novel about a sheltered woman's intellectual liberation. While the narrative explores themes similar to Ray's earlier 1964 classic Charulata (another film based on a Tagore novel), it also offers a subtle yet disturbing meditation on the consequences of wading into dangerous emotional territory. Unfortunately, subtlety is in short supply in Ray's 1989 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Shifting the story to 1980s Bengal, and using a Hindu temple as the source of the contaminated water supply that provides the crux of the plotline, Ray's direction is unusually stiff and wooden, and the sense of urgency in Ibsen's work is never tapped here. Ray recovers with his final film, 1991's The Stranger, an entertaining light drama in which a middle-class family finds itself in a complex guessing game concerning the identity of a visitor claiming to be a long-lost relative. While this release from the Criterion Collection's Eclipse series offers no extras beyond liner notes, the set does make more of Ray's titles available for American audiences. Sure to be welcomed by fans of the great Indian filmmaker, this is highly recommended. (P. Hall)