The Bengali Night
| The Bengali Night | |
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| Directed by | Nicolas Klotz |
| Written by |
Jean-Claude Carrière Mircea Eliade (novel) |
| Starring |
Soumitra Chatterjee Shabana Azmi Hugh Grant Supriya Pathak |
| Music by | Michel Portal, Brij Narayan |
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Release date
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Running time
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115 minutes |
| Country | France Switzerland United Kingdom |
| Language | French |
The Bengali Night (French: la Nuit Bengali) is a 1988 semi-autobiographical film based upon the Mircea Eliade 1933 Romanian novel, Bengal Nights, directed by Nicolas Klotz and starring Hugh Grant, Soumitra Chatterjee, Supriya Pathak and Shabana Azmi.
Allan (Hugh Grant) is an engineer working in 1930s Calcutta. He is invited to stay with the family of his boss, Narendra Sen (Soumitra Chatterjee) which includes his wife, Indira (Shabana Azmi) and daughter Gayatri (Supriya Pathak). Gayatri and Allan become romantically involved leading to tragedy.
Production of the film occurred about a decade after Maitreyi Devi (the inspiration for the character Gayatri) published her version of the story Na Hanyate, (originally published in Bengali). She also extracted a promise from Eliade that his version would never be published in English. According to Ginu Kamani in "A Terrible Hurt:The Untold Story behind the Publishing of Maitreyi Devi", Maitreyi witnessed the making of the film "The Bengali Night," which was shot in Calcutta from 1987-88 (Eliade had died that year). Her protests culminated "in court cases against the film for insulting Hinduism and for being pornographic". The film was only shown once in India at a film festival in 1989 to mixed reviews and was never released in theaters in the U.S. Kamani also notes:
The film was partly shot at village Dhanyakuria.
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