In the holiday hill-town of Darjeeling, the Kanchenjunga is covered with early morning mist on the day Mr. Choudhuri hopes his daughter is proposed to by the well-to-do, Mr. Bannerjee. As the day goes on you realise there are only two people who want this marriage to happen, and neither of them is the girl in question. Also during the day, the family encounters and solves many of it's other teething problems which might never have been spoken about in the busy daily life of Calcutta. You'd least expect Darjeeling to be venue for such a wholesale moral cleansing. But remember, there is the mighty Kanchenjunga looking at it from afar. You can only see it if the mist relents. The parochial patriarch doesn't know that an internal mist is blocking his mind's eyesight. The bickering married couple has it's own sins to clean. The mother, the youngest daughter and the unemployed youth haven't got any such problems. That however is the advantage of a day-long chronicle. The patriarch is as much a caricature as the "good" people are. But it's just a single day in their lives and even that was enough for Mr. Choudhuri to change tracks. Apparently, this film was the first time Ray wrote by himself without adapting from a source. Like in Sonar Kella, he gets his terrain right. If for thieves hunting for ancient treasures he went west, to Rajasthan. For a philosophical experience he went east, to the hills.
Review of Kanchenjungha
