The Hero

Ray's film about cinema. Arindam is a famous Bengali star who boards a train to Delhi for an awards ceremony and spends the twenty-four-hour journey talking to strangers in the compartments. One of the passengers is a young journalist who runs a small women's magazine. He refuses an interview, then starts talking, and she quietly takes out her notebook. As the conversation goes on what he says changes: his move from theatre to film, the mentor he betrayed, the decisions he made and what they cost him. The film contains two dream sequences, Ray's most openly symbolic passages, and drowning in a mountain of money is the best-known image. Uttam Kumar plays Arindam, and the casting is deliberate: Kumar was the real star of Bengali cinema at the time, so he is playing his own position. Sharmila Tagore plays the journalist. Ray wrote the screenplay directly for this film; it is not an adaptation. A conversation film about fame and regret, taking place almost entirely on one train. Quiet for anyone who wants incident, and one of Ray's most personal works for anyone who loves him.