The Stranger

Director: Satyajit Ray

1991 / 120min / 35mm

The coda of perhaps the most celebrated career in subcontinental cinema, Ray’s The Stranger adapts one of the director’s own short stories into a comic, poignant film about the upheaval in a middle-class Calcutta family’s home that follows the appearance of a man, Manmohan (Utpal Dutt, himself approaching the end of a legendary life in pictures), who claims to be a long-lost uncle returning from globe-trotting travels. One of Cahiers du Cinéma’s films of the year, praised by critic Vincent Canby as “a small, gentle, exquisitely realized comedy about, among other things, family loyalties and trust in a world in which traditions have been devalued.”

Distributor: Janus Films

Print courtesy of the Packard Humanities Institute Collection at the Academy Film Archive.

Part of Last Testaments