The greatest strength of Rabindra Nath Tagore's Ghare Baire was its plot. The biggest weakness of Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire is the execution of that same plot. Soumendu Roy's camera seems too lazy to do anything other than staying on the face of the characters delivering their lines, there’s hardly any emoting, and wherever there is any, it tries to overcompensate, leading to disastrous results.
It is painful to see frequent Ray collaborator Soumitra Chatterjee struggling to grasp the character of Sandip Mukherjee throughout the entire film — resulting in nothing short of a debacle. He simply isn’t convincing enough. Swatilekha Sengupta is clearly a misfit in the role of Bimala Choudhury — a casting error of epic proportions. To put it mildly, her acting is wooden, her face devoid of any emotion whatsoever and in physical features, she is a far cry from Tagore’s Bimala. Perhaps the only saving grace of the film, when it comes to the performances, is Victor Banerjee in the role of the reticent and "placid" zamindar Nikhilesh Choudhury. In most of his scenes, Banerjee manages to get under the skin of his character, and plays it with the right mix of cautious optimism and silent despair. You can’t help but feel for him in that one scene where Bimala realises her mistake, breaks down and apologises to him, and he simply embraces his wife by saying,

“It’s not your fault — for the last 10 years, I'm the only man whose face you’ve seen.”