Also check out my Calcutta City Guide where I share some info on great single screens in Calcutta, seeing Bengali movies in Calcutta (with subtitles), and links to Roger Ebert's great writeups on going to a film fest in the city. And for those who want to delve deeper into the great Bengali culture, I also have reading and music recommendations.
I will begin with recommendations for Bengali films and then list some films from other languages set in the region. I also include some great old documentary footage of Calcutta.
I haven’t seen much Bengali cinema outside of Satyajit Ray and a few by his contemporary Ritwik Ghatak. I hope to see more, though I am sad to report that modern Bengali cinema seems fairly weak. Has any film industry in the world declined like the Bengali one has in the past half century? I watch tons of movie trailers from all over India, and a lot of films excite me, but I rarely see anything from Bengal that looks very good. Even the best looking ones generally look like “Oh, that looks like an okay movie to watch if I’m looking to watch a modern Bengali film” rather than something that really stands out. I’m sorry to be harsh, and I realize it is very unfair to make these judgments based on trailers rather than actual films, but these are my honest impressions, and this is the impression I get from critics as well. Unfortunately there are very few critics discussing contemporary Bengali cinema.
It hurts watching such mediocre looking Bengali trailers because…I feel like they should know better? Like I’ve sat through a large number of pretty horrendous movies in many different Indian languages, but in many cases the audience ate it up and it was clear to me that my standards of what constitutes good cinema is very different from the average Indian moviegoer, and I’m able to respect that. But Bengali cinema is different. Some of these bad looking movies are made by Satyajit Ray’s son! It’s just sad to see.
Anyway, on to my recommendations.
I’ll start with Ray’s films. A bit obvious, but I do highly recommend many of them, and even if you’ve seen a few you should see more. He has a wide range of films, covering many genres and settings, and I think it’s unfortunate that many western film fans hardly know him beyond his early work. The standard narrative considers him to be an art house filmmaker but I fear it puts people off from his work, and his films are mainstream and accessible. I’ve seen around half of his work, and at least as of a few years ago I believe I’ve seen all of them that have been restored. Many of the prints are excellent and are generally the best looking Indian movies available from their era, and I hope the rest of his catalogue gets decent restorations soon.
Of the films I’ve seen, I probably loved around a third of them, found another third to be pretty good, and found another third to be just okay, but I found nearly all of them to be worth watching and with great elements (whether it’s the visuals, the music often by Ray himself, interesting narrative/character/setting details, etc), with only one film standing out as a weak effort (the Ibsen adaptation Ganashatru, aka Enemy of the People, which feels made for TV, but I later learned it was made when he was sick and confined to a small studio space, in any case I still kinda liked that movie too). I say watch as many as you can, my favorites may or may not align with yours, and don’t be put off if you find some of the classics to be boring. I should note I'm bored by movies about kids in villages, and I find his Tagore adaptations to be dry.
My top five Ray, which I think will differ from most lists you see (in order of release):
Jalsaghar (The Music Room)
Mahanagar (The Big City)
Seemabaddha (Company Limited)
Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress)
Agantuk (The Stranger)
Of those, Seemabaddha and Mahanagar are the most Calcutta of them (of Ray’s “Calcutta Trilogy” I’ve only seen Seemabaddha, the good news is that there’s a new restoration of Pratidwandi which played at Cannes in 2022).
For more on Ray, check out what I wrote about his fiction in my Bengali literature section. I also really love Ray's poster design.
Other than Ray’s films, the only classic Bengali films I’ve seen are two by Ritwik Ghatak (I believe the only two that have been restored): Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star) and Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas). I have similar feelings on both films. I really loved the first halves, even had occasional crazy “This guy is better than Ray!” thoughts, but then both films fell apart in the second halves for me. In the case of Meghe Dhaka Tara, it was because it was too rushed, while Titas just lost me and I had a hard time keeping track of the characters (and since it’s fairly obscure there weren’t even online plot summaries). But I still highly recommend both of these! Ghatak’s filmmaking is more, uh, Indian than Ray’s, more melodramatic, but in a way it’s also more energetic and experimental, and he has incredibly striking visuals (check out the trailer for the great restorations). The stories are great too, even if they didn’t entirely work for me from start to finish. Meghe Dhaka Tara is in particular a good Calcutta film with its depiction of refugee camps for migrants from East Bengal. I would love to see more of his work and I hope more restorations come soon.
Beyond that, I don't have much to personally recommend, though I do have my database of Indian movies that have played in competition at the Big Three international film festivals: Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. I count 25 Bengali films (all but two of which were before the 1990s), and another 11 that played in some of the other sections at Cannes which I tracked as well (this is just looking at Indian films, there are also a few Bangladeshi films that I wrote about towards the end of that post). Outside of Ray's films, I don't think I've seen any of the movies on that list.
I have seen one film from Mrinal Sen, the most successful Bengali filmmaker on the international festival scene after Ray, though I didn't think all that much of the one I saw, the Hindi language Ek Din Achanak (which played at Venice ). I look forward to going through his works though. I’m not sure what the status is on restorations of his work.
Some other filmmakers who've had good success on the festival scene are Buddhadev Dasgupta and Goutam Ghose, unfortunately I haven't seen any of theirs.
Moving away from the international arthouse scene, one of the biggest names of in Bengali cinema is Aparna Sen. Her acclaimed early films seem good, her newer ones not so much. I only saw Arshinagar, which had some cinematically imaginative moments but was mostly just… loud, I thought. I haven’t seen any from the next waves of filmmakers like Rituparno Ghosh or Kaushik Ganguly but I look forward to checking out their work, with the earlier stuff looking more promising than the later stuff. Srijit Mukerji is one of the big names of the past few decades, some of his films, notably the early ones, seem compelling and he certainly has interesting taste, but the one I saw, Rajkahini, had ambition and a great idea but was just… loud. Here’s a top five