Ghare Baire

Soumitra Chatterjee and Swatilekha Sengupta

Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) is a historical film foregrounded by a love triangle. This film released in 1984 is based on the 1916 novel of the same title by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore also wrote song lyrics and some of these songs find their way into this film adaptation. Both book and film center on Nikhil (Victor Banerjee), a Bengali noble and his wife, Bimala (Swatilekha Sengupta). Nikhil is Western and progressive leaning, for 1907 and his wife follows suit. Their relative domestic bliss is ruptured when nationalist leader and longtime friend, Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee) arrives to visit. Sandip is a charismatic speaker and ladies man who is agitating against British rule. Nikhil doesn't want Bimala to live a cloistered life and practically serves her to Sandip on a plate. She responds to his charms and events lead to a tragic ending.

The novel expresses Tagore's ambivalent attitude towards India's emerging nationalism. As pointed out by Andrew Robinson in his Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, still the best book in English on Ray, the character of Nikhil articulates Tagore's qualms concerning Hindu ethnocentrism. In 1905, Lord Curzon had divided Bengal into Hindu and Muslim sections; the latter corresponding roughly to the present state of Bangladesh. This was a portent of the eventual partitioning of India in 1947, at which time Ray first wrote a screenplay adaptation of the novel. Sandip is shown exploiting this issue and stoking ethnic violence by calling for a ban on foreign trade, a measure which would hurt poor Muslim merchants the most. Nikhil sees Sandip for what he is politically and as an exploiter of women, for Bimala is merely a link on his chain of fools. Nikhil's apparent diffidence is a problem dramatically, but Ray, serene in his dotage, captures his peculiar aura of resigned fatalism. Ghare Baire is a studiously conducted chamber play in a languorous mansion full of wonders and wondrous kitsch. We do see scenes of the world outside Nikhil's mansion, but sparingly.

The deliberate pacing of the film and its political background may make this a hard film to get into. It reminds me of late Visconti in its decorous lassitude. What gave me an insight that opened up the film for me was Ray's direction of Gopa Aich, a neophyte cast as Nikhil's widowed sister-in-law. She wears white to denote her widowhood, a portent.The role is ridiculous. The woman is bored and not too subtly enamored with Nikhil. Ray directs the actress broadly, as if she were a diva in a comic opera. The film uses music throughout with songs in both Bengali and English. Ray shoots this chamber play as if it were an opera, again akin to Visconti. There are duos and trios and the usual tra-la-la triangle. The three leads make their characters sing. Ray had a heart attack while filming, his place was taken by his son, Sandip, who followed his father's instructions. This circumstance has led to Ghare Baire being treated as a lesser effort in the Ray canon, but I found it to be a fully integrated masterpiece.

Ghare Baire has just been released on disc by Criterion as part of its Eclipse series in a set entitled Late Ray. The other two films in the set are two other late Ray entries, An Enemy of the People and The Stranger. An Enemy of the People is dull and tired, an overly earnest and static attempt to transpose Ibsen's play to 1989 India. Why Ray tacked on a Frank Capra style ending onto the material is beyond me. The bedraggled Steve McQueen version is more interesting. Ray's final film, The Stranger, shares many of the same players as An Enemy of the People, but is a appreciably livelier film. There is color, song, dance, and even a few exterior scenes. Ray's screenplay is reminiscent of Ghare Baire: an interloper temporarily upsets an established domestic balance. In this case, the stranger of the title is a long lost uncle of dubious provenance. The intrigue is slim, but The Stranger has its modest charms. 

You Can See Everything

 Amanda Seyfried       

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything is, ostensibly, a documentary about the now imprisoned Theranos executive Elizabeth Holmes. The filmmakers were invited to film Holmes, her husband, and two small children in a beachside house they rented in San Diego for the last month or so before Holmes was scheduled to begin her sentence. Mr. Fielder appears onscreen throughout as the couples' interlocutor. I would argue that we learn more about his character than that of the shifty couple. Since I think objectivity in film documentary is a crock, and has been since Nanook waved at Robert Flaherty, Mr. Fielder's presence makes this a more personal picture than the usual talking head fests. The filmmakers were smart enough to know that seeking truth in such a complex and thorny case as this is foolhardy, especially when you are dealing with such slippery customers as Ms. Holmes and her hubby. However, the two are so cluelessly cocooned in their delusional bubble that they help make You Can See Everything the funniest American comedy of 2026. The ellipses of Ms. Holmes' non-answers provide perfect comic beats.

I watched the film at a sold out matinee and and was amazed at the number of gasps, guffaws, and belly laughs the picture elicited. The film is visually monotonous, mostly enormous close-ups of faces, but I and the rest of the audience were largely riveted. The filmmakers seem at sea when Ms Holmes enters the hoosegow, but an entertaining fiction saves the project. Amanda Seyfried, who played Ms. Holmes in a Hulu movie, and Christopher Abbott are enlisted to play versions of Holmes and mate. A pre-filming meeting that displays the dynamics between the couple is reenacted, as is a prison visitation resulting in a documentary film that plays around with the form. You Can See Everything does not attempt to give us facts in a Joe Friday fashion, but gives us much to chew and ruminate on. 

Scenes from a Marriage

Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann

In certain cases, I have reserved a few works of art to contemplate in my dotage. I just read Proust for the first time and was underwhelmed. He reminded me of Virginia Woolf in his self-absorption. There are always a few Dorothy Dunnett and Tom Sharpe novels that I am saving for my deathbed because I love their prose so. Scenes from a Marriage was in this category partially because I am a recovering Bergmaniac. When the shortened film version was released in the US in 1974, I was deep in the throes of my adoration of the Swedish Ubermensch. I grew up in Baltimore where we were able to receive Washington D. C. stations if we pointed the rabbit eared antenna a certain way. WETA ran a series of Bergman films from the Janus collection with commentary from the young Roger Ebert and I was hooked. I was able to see everything from Summer with Monika through Winter Light as a teen and it helped me glom onto cinema as an art form. Scenes from a Marriage had gotten huzzahs from the American critics, but, being the contrary budding aesthete I was, I vowed to wait and view the real deal.

It was worth the wait. The six part (or scenes), 297 minute 1973 television series has a breadth of vision that eclipses the film version which omits two hours of footage. The length of the series opens up our understanding of Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), the married and then divorced but always a couple the film chronicles. The series was filmed in color by Sven Nykvist, but the baroque expressionism of Cries and Whispers (an alleged masterpiece I find over wrought) has been discarded. Scenes from a Marriage recalls The Rite, also lensed by Nykvist, in that it is a chamber play, almost entirely shot in interiors. What exteriors that exist in the series usually show the characters tearing around the countryside in a Volvo. They are usually there for a reason, though. Bergman repeats a shot of a parked vehicle at the couple's summer cottage to express what has been lost in the passage of time.  The first instance is when Johan is telling Marianne that he is leaving her. The second is when the couple, now divorced and married to unseen others, arrive at the cottage to rekindle their romance. They are able to do so, but only by leaving that cottage and escaping the ghosts of the past.

The majority of the series focuses on interior duologues between Johan and Marianne. These scenes start out in long shot, establishing the perimeter of the field of marital combat, but they always end in tight close-ups. Sometimes of someone in anguish, usually Marianne, but more often with the couple having found a rapprochement, cuddling. There are a lot enormous close-ups, like the one above, of the couple together as a unit, her yin to his yang as it were. Johan is the rational male side, more self centered and sarcastic. Marianne is the masochistic female empath. As has been pointed out, Bergman's sympathies lie with the distaff side even though Josephson's character, as in After the Rehearsal, can be looked at as a Bergman stand-in. However, I detect glimpses of hope within the usual Bergman battle of the sexes. We get plenty of the hell is other people schtick, particularly in the dinner party with Bibi Andersson and Jan Malmsjo, and Ibsen and Strindberg get the usual shout-outs, but the protagonists display personal growth. Johan becomes a little more empathic or "softer" as Marianne puts it and Marianne becomes more independent and sure of herself.

Ms. Ullmann's performance is one of the greatest of the last century, but the care and the skill of the other performers is not far behind. Wench Foss, Norwegian like Ms. Ullmann, is especially memorable as Marianne's mother in a scene snipped from the film version. The scene, in which Marianne blithely tells her mother that she will not be attending her father's interment, is a signpost of Marianne liberating herself from the rituals and unspoken rules of the previous generation. Liberation is not a concept generally found in the claustrophobic world of Herr Bergman, but it is there in Scenes from a Marriage.