ACCLAIMED INDIAN FILMS AT MELNITZ

The fourth and final director to be honored in UCLA’s “Classic Films From India” series is the only one still active, Mrinal Sen, who is one of the most internationally acclaimed of all contemporary Indian film makers but whose work has remained largely unavailable in the United States. Yet his venturesome, dynamic style, his brisker pacing (and shorter running times) bring him closer in spirit to the West than any other major Indian film maker.

Among the Sen films to be screened this weekend in Melnitz Theater are “Bhuvan Shome” (1969) and “Interview” (1970), and both are subtle, bemused gems, full of the unexpected and expressing a deep longing to overthrow the lingering cultural imperialism of the British raj. They are also quite funny, the first much gentler in its satire than the second.

Bhuvan Shome (Utpal Dutt) is a silver-haired, paunchy, pompous, middle-aged railway executive with a bureaucratic passion for precision inculcated in him by the traditions of the British, who have only just relinquished their rule of India.

He also is a lonely widower, bored and exhausted by the routine he observes so slavishly, who impetuously decides to take a duck-hunting holiday. After a comically bone-shattering ride in a bullock cart--and an encounter with a rampaging buffalo--Shome finds himself caught up in a calm, gentle world which he never knew existed. He strikes up a friendship with the bullock-cart driver’s pretty, vivacious daughter (Suhasini Mulay), who is far more spontaneous and outspoken than most young Indian women. There’s a crucial, coincidental connection between her and Shome’s work, which allows for his consciousness to be raised ever so deftly.

“Bhuvan Shome,” which screens Sunday at 5 p.m., is a perfect example of the telling of what is essentially a short story and has equally flawless performances. Yet for all such classic qualities, this film and “Interview” both have a quirkiness in their various devices--bits of animation to send up the paper chase in Shome’s office, a partial masking of the screen to signal the beginning of a character’s thinking to himself--that are reminiscent of the French New Wave. (Sen is known to have been greatly impressed by Truffaut’s “400 Blows” and “Jules and Jim.”)

There is much that’s amusing in “Interview,” which screens Saturday evening, but it is a far more bitter film than “Bhuvan Shome,” and has been said to mark the more overtly political phase of Sen’s career. It is simplicity itself. Thanks to a relative, a well-educated young Calcutta man (Ranjit Mullick, most appealing), a jack-of-all-trades for a small print shop, at last has a chance at a much better job with an Indo-English firm. All he has to do is come in for an interview, a mere formality, he’s assured. The only problem is getting his hands on a suit for the occasion; traditional Indian dress, so much more appropriate to the climate, just wouldn’t do. In what turns out to be one long, frustrating, nightmarish joke, Mullick has as much trouble getting hold of proper attire as the hero of “The Bicycle Thief” has in getting his stolen bicycle back. Even though Sen finds more humor than pathos in his hero’s predicament, he is in his way making as much a comment as De Sica was on postwar Italy: What is wrong with Indian dress anyway? Why should Indians allow themselves to feel their customs and ways are inferior to those of the British after so many years of independence? It’s not for nothing that “Interview” has a pre-credit sequence showing the removal of statues of British heroes, which occurred at the passing of British rule.

“In Search of Famine” (“Akaler Sandhane”), shown at the County Museum of Art in 1982 and screening Saturday at 8 p.m., prior to “Interview,” is just as subtly ironic as Sen’s earlier films but is more leisurely in pace. Five million Bengalis starved to death in 1943 because, under British rule, India’s already diminished rice supply was reserved primarily for the armed forces.

This 1980 film tells with wit and sorrow of a movie company that has gone to the countryside in an attempt to film a drama dealing with this catastrophe; alas, the more intent the film makers become in re-creating the past the more insensitive they become to the natives and their present-day realities. For further information: (213) 825-9261, 825-258l.