Anuranan

Rahul Bose as Rahul and Raima Sen as Preeti in Anuranan

It's not often that one finds Bengali language films playing in movie theaters in the U.S. (unless it's a retrospective of the films of Satyajit Ray), so on a lark, I persuaded my husband to take me to see Anuranan.

Anuranan is about two couples: the dreamy/poetic Rahul (Rahul Bose) and his wife Nandita (Rituparna Sengupta) and driven businessman/domineering husband Amit (Rajat Kapoor) and his repressed wife Preeti (played by Raima Sen, granddaughter of Bengali cinema legend Souchitra Sen). Gradually, Preeti finds that she can find expression for her interests in literature and nature with Rahul. The relationship has tragic consequences.

As with many Bengali offerings, Anuranan is replete with quotations of songs and poems of Tagore. In the way that Anuranan deals with a woman who finds (non-sexual) self-expression through a man other than her husband, it recalls Satyajit Ray's films Charulata and Ghare-Baire, both based on stories by Tagore.