THE STRANGER (Directed by Satyajit Ray. Starring Uptal Duht, Mamata Shankar, Deepankar De)

Satyajit Ray died last year, leaving The Stranger as a last testament to his gently humanistic style of film-making. Although, like much of Ray’s work, visually static and dialogue laden, The Stranger succeeds in being both amusing and moving while ruminating on issues of some philosophical depth.

A middle-class Calcutta couple receive a visit from an ageing, long lost uncle that they can barely remember. While the uncle (Uptahl Duht) calls on a traditional right to hospitality, the response of the couple varies between begrudging acceptance, suspicion and outright hostility. Anila (Mamata Shankar) is more or less prepared to take him on face value, but her husband Sudhindra (Deepankar De) is consumed with doubt about whether the visitor is really who he says he is, and deeply irritated at the idea that he might be feeding an impostor. For his part the self-proclaimed uncle, worldly and more sophisticated than his hosts, cannot help but teasing out their doubts. He is the devil’s advocate, although it transpires he has doubts of his own.

Although tending to the verbose, and played as a sly but affectionate satire of the bourgeoisie, there are bigger issues at the heart of the film. The couple, half-westernised but not nearly as sophisticated as they imagine, have lost touch with traditional values while the old man, who left India to se the world is, at the end of his life, coming back to tradition, having found no answers elsewhere. There is a sadness lurking beneath the wit, a note of lament sounded out for the rapidly changing Indian society, although Ray treats us to one last twist, allowing the audience to leave the cinema on a high note, just as Ray himself has done.

RATING: HHHH

LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (Directed by Alain Resnais. Starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff, Françoise Bertin)

Back in 1961 a lot of goatee beards were scratched over this film. Elliptical, deliberately obscure, icily beautiful, chronologically scrambled and frustratingly unrevealing, Last Year In Marienbad is, if not quite the original, probably the ultimate art movie. The action, if you can call it that, takes place inside and outside a grand hotel, with human sculptures and geometric gardens. A man called X meets a woman called A whom he may or may not have had an affair with the year before in Marienbad. We never find out the answer, a fact which I presume is more important than what the answer is. She is beautiful, he is handsome, they dress impeccably, speak French and . . . that’s about it really. There is a game player called M (not to be confused with James Bond’s boss) who always wins, probably because nobody else understands the rules of the games he is playing.

Last Year In Marienbad still looks crisply wonderful in a sharp new print but otherwise it has not aged well. It is art in the same way the Turner prize-winning concrete house was art, where the idea of what it is is more important than the reality, and the reviews more meaningful than their subject. Resnais made finer meditations on dream and memory, (Nuit et Brouillard, Hiroshima Mon Amour) and his cinematic modernism has been taken to more potent places by film-makers like Jarman, Lynch and Krysztof and Kieslowski, all of whom have more passion and humanity. The debate in the sixties would have been whether it was meaningless or a masterpiece, in the nineties it is patently more boring than it is mesmerising.