MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Journey’ Carries Doctor Down Path to Enlightenment

When India’s great filmmaker Satyajit Ray was stricken with heart disease, he became all too aware that only the rich could afford good medical care for even the simplest treatments. As he recuperated, he determined to address this problem and commenced writing a script, “The Broken Journey,” that he believed would be “his best and most important film yet.”

Just a few weeks before the February, 1992, start of production, Ray was again hospitalized and decided that his director-son Sandip, who had worked with his father since he was a child, would direct the exteriors under his supervision. But Ray would never leave the hospital alive, dying on April 13 at age 70. Exactly a year later Sandip would begin directing the film himself--and honoring his father’s legacy with a stunning picture that has the impact of Satyajit’s finest efforts.

Understandably and forgivably, it begins a bit statically, a bit self-consciously and not just a little didactically. But very soon Sandip Ray’s confidence grows and the inherent cumulative power of the material takes over. Soumitra Chatterjee, a veteran actor of understated strength, stars as Dr. Nihar Sengupta, a self-absorbed, middle-aged Calcutta high-society physician whose social consciousness goes no further than commenting on the irony that widespread failure of family planning is occurring at the same time life spans are increasing.

Sengupta takes off for Jamshedpur, less than a day’s drive, to stay overnight with an old friend he hasn’t seen in a decade and the next day to address the local Rotary Club on medical advances of the past two decades. Along the way, when his luxury car has a flat tire, he discovers lying in a field a peasant, Haladhar (Debotosh Ghosh), near death from pneumonia.

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Satyajit Ray’s wisdom gleams in allowing the transforming effect of this encounter upon the doctor to sink into him in stages. Only when he actually witnesses Haladhar being beaten by brooms and his chest stomped on by the local witch doctor does he at last assert himself and take over the treatment of the desperately ill man.

What Sengupta discovers in Haladhar’s village is that he’s stumbled into antiquity--there’s no electricity, no government health center and no phone closer than a half-hour drive. He also meets Haladhar’s pretty daughter Manashi (Subhalakshmi Munshi), who is 17, about the same age as his own daughter. Manashi has lost her mother to malaria and her husband to a snakebite.

Whereas Sengupta’s own daughter, in her mother’s words, has become rude and indifferent, Manashi exudes a quiet strength, resigned to being ill-fated and calmly going about caring for her father, the local drunk, and her younger brother.

By now Sengupta has recalled his Hippocratic oath, yet an ever-inspired Satyajit Ray has come up with a couple of twists and turns to elicit a devastating finish, beautifully timed and staged by Sandip, who also shares his father’s gifts with actors and the composition of spare, eloquent film scores. Intimate and leisurely, “The Broken Journey” is small in scale but universal in its timeliness, with implications that apply to the United States--Los Angeles in particular--with just as much force as to India.

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Unrated. Times guidelines: The film is fine for older children but too intense for younger ones.

‘The Broken Journey’

Soumitra Chatterjee: Dr. Sengupta

Subhalakshmi Munshi: Manashi

Debotosh Ghosh: Haladhar

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A Filmopolis Pictures release of a National Film Development Corp. of India production. Producer-director-composer Sandip Ray. Screenplay and story by Satyajit Ray. Cinematographer Barun Raha. Editor Dulal Dutt. Costumes Lalita Ray. Production designer Ashoke Bose. In Bengali with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes.

* At the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741, and the South Coast Village 3, 1561 W. Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, (714) 540-0594.