"Actor: Chhabi Biswas"

• The Music Room (The Criterion Collection) | Blu Ray | (07/08/2017) from £17.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  SATYAJIT RAY'S POWERFUL TRAGIC DRAMA A CORNERSTONE OF THE MONUMENTAL DIRECTOR'S CAREER With The Music Room (Jalsaghar), SATYAJIT RAY (Pather Panchali) brilliantly evokes the crumbling opulence of the world of a fallen aristocrat (the beloved actor CHHABI BISWAS) desperately clinging to his way of life. His greatest joy is the music room in which he has hosted lavish concerts over the years now a shadow of its former vivid self. An incandescent depiction of the clash between tradition and modernity, and a showcase for some of India's most popular musicians of the day, The Music Room is a defining work by the great Bengali filmmaker. Special Features: New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Satyajit Ray (1984), a feature documentary by Shyam Benegal that chronicles Ray's career and includes interviews with the filmmaker, family photographs, and extensive clips from his films New interview with filmmaker Mira Nair New interview in which Ray biographer Andrew Robinson discusses the making of The Music Room and the film's cultural significance Excerpt from a 1981 French roundtable discussion with Ray, film critic Michel Ciment, and filmmaker Claude Sautet New and improved English subtitle translation PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Philip Kemp as well as reprints of a 1963 essay by Ray and a 1986 interview with the director about the film's music

• Devi (1960) (AKA The Goddess) (Criterion Collection) UK Only | Blu Ray | (22/11/2021) from £19.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Master filmmaker Satyajit Ray (The Apu Trilogy) explores the conflict between fanaticism and free will in Devi (The Goddess), issuing a subversively modern challenge to religious orthodoxy and patriarchal power structures. In the waning days of mid-nineteenth-century India's feudal system, after his son (Apur Sansar's Soumitra Chatterjee) leaves for Kolkata to complete his studies, a wealthy rural landowner (The Music Room's Chhabi Biswas) is seized by the notion that his beloved daughter-in-law (The Hero's hauntingly sad-eyed Sharmila Tagore) is the reincarnation of the goddess Kalia delusion that proves devastating to the young woman and those around her. The opulently stylized compositions and the chiaroscuro lighting by cinematographer Subrata Mitra (Charulata) heighten the entrancing expressionistic intensity of this domestic tragedy, making for an experience that is both sublime and shattering. Bonus Features 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Interviews with actors Sharmila Tagore and Soumitra Chatterjee, recorded in 2013 Video essay by film scholar Meheli Sen English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by film critic Devika Girish

• Devi Goddess | DVD | (14/09/2009) from £3.07   |  Saving you £8.18 (451.93%)   |  RRP £9.99

  In Goddess (aka: Devi) Doyamoyee is left alone with her husband's ageing father-in-law a devoted follower of the goddess Kali. One evening the aging widower she cares for has a dream that she is an avatar of Kali and must be worshipped. Word spreads and others come to believe that she is an incarnation of the deity. Hearing this alarming news her husband Umprasad returns only to find Doyamoyee herself beginning to believe that she is an avatar; a belief which soon turns to tragedy.