The Adversary

Customer Reviews:

Understated and intense...a gripping film.......2008-02-09

Set against the city of calcutta in turmoil during the naxalite unrests of the early 70s, an intense film of a young man opposing the circumstances he finds himself in, and trying to come to terms with them at the same time. Brilliant performances by all concerned, set against the backdrop of intense camerawork in black and white, and the old districts of Chowringhee in Calcutta, a memorable film. Ray's characters say so little, yet convey so much! One of Ray's best films, together with "Jana Aranya" (The Middleman)-another masterpeice about an individual's life in the city of Calcutta.

Extraordinary but strangely underrated.......2007-12-16

The Adversary has always been one of Ray's most underrated films. Even Ray's greatest admirers rarely regard it as one of his best. They are wrong. In it, Ray was reacting, on one level, to criticisms that he preferred to film safe subjects rather than the turmoil of modern India. More specifically, he was recording his own perceptions of the political and cultural chaos of his hometown Calcutta - Maoist revolts coming on top of (perhaps because of) decades of underinvestment, unemployment, cultural stagnation and industrial unrest. Ray took the plot from a novel by a young, rebellious but not too leftist writer and transformed it into a searing portrait of an introspective, sensitive individual trapped in a decaying city that is apparently on the verge of imploding. The hero Siddhartha is no revolutionary (although his younger brother is) but, unlike his sister, he is not eager to sell out to whatever capitalist opportunities there are. Somewhat like an Apu in a world turned upside down, Siddhartha hangs on to his sanity until the very end, when, through an apparently crazy act, he loses everything but might well have saved his soul. Ray ends the film with a virtuouso juxtaposition of a Hindu funeral chant and the song of a mysterious bird that Siddhartha recalls from his childhood. (Non-Bengali viewers of this disc may miss the former because the subtities do not translate it.) This scene has always seemed to me to be one of Ray's greatest achievements. His films, it used to be said, were full of death; he is also often praised for his life-affirming humanism. Here, those two themes fuse magnificently, making Siddhartha the quintessential Ray hero, perhaps even the summing up of all previous Ray heroes, an individual who can find victory in loss and death in success. This is a common enough theme in Ray's films (The Big City, Company Limited) and stories (Ashamanjababu and His Dog, Patolbabu Filmstar, and many others unknown in the West) but he never expressed it more movingly or pithily than here. The film as a whole is a troubled, edgy, often uncomfortable masterpiece that cries out to be discovered by Ray fans. Those who worship the maker of the Apu trilogy as a cuddly, lyrical humanist are particularly advised to see The Adversary and, to complete their disorientation, the cataclysmic The Middleman.

The print on this disc is fine (not brilliant, but pretty good), but the subtitles are often illegible. The original Bengali titles in Ray's characteristic calligraphy are missing, as is the striking initial image of the film's title as a word, so to speak, at war with itself (the first part of the Bengali word Pratidwandi flashes first and then the second, and I seem to recall that this is repeated whilst Siddhartha broods over the funeral pyre of his father). Anyhow, given the scarcity of good DVDs of Ray's films, one can't be too fussy and on the whole, this is a good disc and worth buying, if only to encourage the vendor to bring out other underrated gems from Ray (please Mr Bongo could we have The Middleman next?)

Saint Seiya, Vol. 3: Dark Adversaries (REGION 1) (NTSC)

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Saint Seiya, Vol. 3: Dark Adversaries (REGION 1) (NTSC)
Starring: Ryan Worthington , John Swasey , Sanshirô Nitta , Gilda Santiago , and Kim Kuhteubl
Director: Yasuhito Kikuchi , and Kôzô Morishita
Manufacturer: A.D.V. Films
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00016MT2K
Release Date: 2004-01-13

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