Satyajit Ray’s films are soft-focus photos of the human mind and the human heart at work. Although set on the Indian subcontinent, his themes—the work of relationships, the emotions that seem to inhere in the natural world, and music as a sensory world unto itself—have had universal appeal. "Villains bore me," Ray has said, and his films have a deeply optimistic soul that audiences around the world have loved for two generations. Few filmmakers have had as breathtaking a debut as Ray’s stunning PATHER PANCHALI, in 1955, but few also have been able to follow early success with as thoughtful and eloquent a filmography as Ray’s in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. TWO DAUGHTERS is one of the truly evocative works in that filmography, and one of Ray’s most characteristic.

TWO DAUGHTERS is an anthology film, based on the stories "The Postmaster" and "The Conclusion" by India’s great storyteller Rabindranath Tagore. TWO DAUGHTERS was one of many works which marked the centennial of Tagore’s birth; Ray had just finished RABINDRANATH TAGORE, a loving documentary on his spiritual progenitor, which many critics feel is the best biographical film ever made in India. Ray has always felt himself to be a storyteller in the Tagore vein, drawing inspiration from the other arts, and funneling the knowledge of many cultures into his closely observed portraits of the Indian universe. Ray attended college at the institution founded by Tagore, and Tagore had been a close friend of Ray’s artist father. Tagore had left his imprint deep upon the university at Santiniketan, and Ray has often expressed his gratitude for the Tagore-like spirit of renaissance he found there. Like Tagore, Ray has schooled himself in many arts—painting and writing as well as cinematography—and beginning with TWO DAUGHTERS, he wrote the musical scores for his films as well.

Both these stories, outwardly so different, share the same preoccupations. Both are fascinated with the migrations, here from city to country, that are so important in the shifting seas of Indian demography. Ray himself had been loath to leave his bustling native Calcutta for the backwardness of Santiniketan, which was "miles from nowhere," but he called his time in the country "my most formative years." Both stories look wonderingly at youth, that most difficult of times, and paint it with the remarkable integrity and sympathy very characteristic of Ray’s view of childhood. Both stories are also intrigued with the placid surfaces and rapid undercurrents of rural life, where madness often lives incongruously side by side with the prosaic, on dusty country lanes and rainy small town streets. Some have called TWO DAUGHTERS Chekhovian, two stories of deceptively ordinary everyday life that seem placed side by side almost casually, but whose affinities are deep and strong. Like a dragonfly hovering delicately over a still woodland pond, comedy and sadness are balanced precisely in these two tiny masterpieces, and Satyajit Ray’s lovely TWO DAUGHTERS echoes in the mind, its images footfall on a quiet path through the soul.