Satyajit Ray, the noted Indian director, is up to his usual lack of tricks in his latest film, Kanchenjungha. Once again he has dared to make a movie of such stately pace and conventionality of imagery that it—and the audience—always teeters on the brink of boredom. Once again his characters are fictional familiars—archetypes in danger of becoming stereotypes. Once again his story is little more than a cliché. And once again, by a magic that is peculiarly his own, he forces us to attend his deliberately difficult work closely and to care, perhaps more than common sense would dictate, about its outcome. (p. 77)

Some sketchy subplots underpin [the] central situation, but they are no more thrill-packed than the major premise. The Darjeeling setting is interesting, but Ray, who is no pictorialist, handles it routinely. The technical quality of the film is distractingly poor. What, then, is so fascinating about it?

I cannot fully answer that question, since I know the picture did its most forceful work on me below the conscious level, but I suspect it has to do with Ray's patient, insistent probing for the meanings of gestures and glances and silences, his search for the psychic realities that lie beneath conversational conventions and banalities. All these small matters carry a weight in this film that is far heavier than normal, and as we strain forward to catch their true meanings we are, almost against our wills, caught up in the mysteries, the psychopathology if you will, of everyday life. Almost imperceptibly the gentle flow of this film draws us beneath the surface of an ordinary situation, involving very ordinary people, and reveals unsuspected depths, material for speculation that lingers in the mind long after the film has ended.

In an era when most directors are exploiting the visual possibilities of their medium to the utmost, Ray, filming in a crude and even antique style, is perhaps the most daring of them all. He has deliberately cut himself off from all the gaudy gimmicks now available to help the director over the thin and through the rough spots of a script. By also avoiding the more traditional attention-grabbing devices—glamorized settings, décor, costumes, scenes highly charged with overt action and emotion—he has set himself extraordinarily narrow limits within which to work. His films are too "uncinematic" for the purists, too lacking in sensation to appeal much to the wide audience. Essentially, he is like a novelist of sensibility compelling us, through his sensitivity to nuance and the purity and economy of his art, to observe with him the small telling details that reveal the ways people relate—and fail to relate—to one another. Such artists are rarely popular, but they are valuable, reminding us that there are strengths in limitations, truths in subtleties. (pp. 78-9)