Three Daughters

Satyajit Ray's film made from three stories by Rabindranath Tagore. It was prepared for the centenary of Tagore's birth. There are three separate stories, and what they have in common is a woman at the centre. The first follows the bond between a young postmaster assigned to a remote village and the orphan girl who looks after him; he teaches her to read and write, and then leaves. The second is the story of a woman fixated on jewellery, and its register is close to a ghost story. The third is about a girl pushed into marriage who does not want to leave her childhood, and it sits between comedy and drama. Ray wrote the music himself. In international distribution the middle section was removed and the film was shown as two stories. Which is why some sources give the work three parts and others two. An important work for anyone who likes Indian cinema, adaptations of Tagore and the short-story form. For a viewer expecting a single narrative, the parts do not connect; each works as its own film and their tones are markedly different.