Rated by the British film critic Phillip French as Satyajit
Ray best work Mahanagar (1963) is set in Calcutta and tells the story of a
lower middle class family who fall on hard times. The main breadwinner is
Subrata Mazumdar (Anil Chatterjee), a well educated but poorly paid bank clerk.
Married to Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee) they have a small son, and share a cramped
apartment with Subrata's teenage sister Bani (played by Jaya Bhaduri in her
debut film and who went on to become one of India's leading actresses) and his
mother and father. Because of the increasing financial pressure on the family
Arati takes a job of selling knitting machines door to door. This as you would
imagine in such a traditional country is not accepted by all the members of the
family and begins to course conflict between them. Even her husband is not keen
on his wife working but when he looses his job with the bank it becomes even
more imperative that Arati takes on the role of the family's sole breadwinner.
Adapted by Ray from the short story Abataranika by the renowned Bengali writer Narendranath Mitra this
award winning film was re-released as part of a BFI retrospective of Rays work
and for the first time, in September 2013, was released on Blu-Ray which manages
to accentuates the beautiful black and white photography of Ray's regular
cinematographer Sabrata Mitra. Totally believable and superbly acted this is an
engrossing study of India just 20 years after its independence and shows
the changing mood of the countries urban middle class along with its social
dynamics, which is a constant theme found in Satyajit Ray's body of work.
Although not as successful in his native country, which preferred the crowd-pleasing
Bollywood movies, it was this type of film that helped establish what we now
know as world cinema.
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| Husband and wife don't always see eye to eye in Ray's social realist Indian movie. |
