A River Called Titas

1973 [BANGLA]

Action / Drama

11
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 80%
IMDb Rating 7.2/10 10 1519 1.5K

Director

Top cast

Ritwik Ghatak as Tilakchand
Rawshan Zamil as Basanti's mother
Golam Mustafa as Ramprasad / Kader Mian
Abul Hayat as Thakur
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
1.42 GB
988*720
Bangla 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
2 hr 38 min
Seeds 1
2.64 GB
1472*1072
Bangla 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
2 hr 38 min
Seeds 10

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by boblipton 7 / 10

Believing Is Seeing

Rosy Samad gets married and goes on a honeymoon trip with her husband from the village where they live to a nearby village. However, she is discovered, without her husband, and no idea of what has happened. This disgraces her, and she spends the next ten years in exile, next to the village. Then a madman turns up, and she attempts to gain redemption by curing him of his madness.You'd think that after a lifetime of reading fantasy and studying the anthropology of magic, this would be catnip to me. However, fantasy as it is written tends to have an almost engineering quality to its construction, with things like quests that must be undertaken, or great monsters that must be fought, or princesses that must be rescued. The patterns are too familiar. Likewise, the magic in these things is constructed like machinery. Occasionally you run across things based on Greek mythology, where the gods are squabbling people taking one side or the other, and throwing thunderbolts or sending earthquakes.But to look at this movie is to see a society that is barely above animism, the belief that everything has a soul, whether it is a human or a cat, or a tree, or a rock. And the only way someone like me can handle a worldview like that is in a mechanical fashion. There is no mystery, just ignorance, and a rock falls from your hand to the ground when you release it regardless. But the characters in this movie believe in the mystery. The river Titas may just go away, or Miss Samad may just be fooling herself. No one knows anything, and no one can know anything. It's not a worldview I can believe, and so I am reduced to seeing if the movie is internally consistent.... but that won't work either, because if it's not, then that is also a mystery, an insoluble one that is a fact of existence.It makes my head spin. Ritwik Ghatak's movie tells a tale of a small fishing village where reality and legend are the same thing. Is it a good telling? My Western mind can't really tell.
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Reviewed by Atavisten 6 / 10

Life flowing with the river

Typically for Indian movies this has it all, evil capitalists that destroy the property of the poor peasants, a man struck insane by the abduction of his newly-wed wife from arranged marriage, compassionate families that end up turning against the one they help and a lot of smoking from water pipes and chewing of betel nut.

The film starts by announcing that not many people know about and much less care about the people living in this region which is one of the world's poorest places. And by the end of it most things look very unfortunate for them still. It is realistically made, shot on location so that doesn't feel contrived. That being said, some of the acting looks funny and artificial by our standards. As we move focal points also it can be a little difficult to follow the numerous plots.

Antropologically interesting too.

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