36 Chowringhee Lane

Being the tatty Calcutta apartment where a sixty-ish Anglo-Indian schoolteacher stagnates in austere spinsterhood. The companionship temporarily promised by a young couple who use her flat as a secret trysting-place tempts her out of self-imposed purdah, but her disillusionment is swift and terrible. In fact her life is portrayed as a succession of downbeat events - from the early loss of a sweetheart, fallen in the war, to her brother's death and the final indignity of demotion - and the material doesn't mesh with debut director Aparna Sen's predilection for extravagant effects (arty editing, a surreal dream sequence, clumsily signalled climaxes). However, the film is miraculously rescued from shallow melancholia by Jennifer Kendal's performance, which invests the 'repressed old maid' stereotype with surprising subtlety and tenderness.