"...a poetic and sensitive film on contemporary Calcutta" (Satyajit Ray). In his first feature, Dasgupta explores ideological conflicts in India and their effect on domestic life via a portrait of a lonely young intellectual. Mondar (Mamata Shankar), a professor at a Calcutta college, finds himself withdrawing from left-wing politics, dismayed and confused by the upheavals of the early seventies. When a comrade asks him to hide a fellow politico on the run, he refuses. This political distance reflects a universal sense of isolation and guilt for Mondar, who marries then divorces his wife within a month when he learns she is pregnant with another man's child. For his wife, Anjali (Pradip Mukherjee), the decision to have the child is a calculated rebellion against the sterility she feels in her life; she had hoped to draw Mondar out of his own emotional frigidity and into a valuable commitment, as well. Dasgupta conceived The Distance as the first in a trilogy of "city films," the second being Crossroads (1982) and the third, the Hindi film The Blind Alley (1984). The refrain in all three films is a protagonist running away from the truth. As Variety critic Gene Moskovitch wrote of The Distance, "Dasgupta has elicited fine performances and used the city and other characters subtly as counterpoint to the professor's attempt to find a means of assuaging his loneliness, as well as taking a stand on his values and actions..."