The Big City
Mahanagar
Satyajit Ray (1963)
The increasingly gripping story of what happens to a Bengali family when the wife and mother of two children – an early teenage girl, a younger boy – takes a job to help with the household finances. The time is 1953; the place is Calcutta. Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee) gets employment as a door-to-door saleswoman (of knitting machines). Tentative at first, she gains confidence: she’s good at the work; she earns money and a degree of unexpected independence. As she blooms, the men in the family shrivel – Arati’s husband Subrata (Anil Chatterjee), her father-in-law Priyogopal (Haren Chatterjee). Their attitudes are very different at first: Subrata, who works in a bank, is supportive; Priyogopal thinks the very idea of Arati’s going out to work is scandalous, and won’t speak to her. Her mother-in-law Sarojini (Sefalika Devi) feels and reacts in much the same way. Once Arati is bringing home a wage, Subrata becomes increasingly uncomfortable: it’s as if his wife has subverted family life. When the bank goes bust and he loses his job, things get worse – that is to say, Arati becomes the sole breadwinner. Her going to work has indeed made a difference to the men’s lives, not least in exposing fissures in their self-esteem and self-belief that were already there. The old man is a retired teacher, losing his sight, envious of the material success of his former students. One of them, a successful optician, gives Priyogopal an eye test and a pair of spectacles, free of charge. With a distressing mixture of self-assertion and self-abasement, Priyogopal goes to an even more successful lawyer, who provides the handout his former teacher was looking for, although the lawyer’s gesture is perfunctory and the amount of money is small. Two generations on, Arata’s son Pintu (Prosenjit Sarkar) feigns a fever to try and keep his mother at home although she is able to curb his resentment of her absence at work by promising and buying him a toy or two.
The Big City is richly complex. The routine and simplicity of the old family life are lost once Arati starts work yet the male attempts to thwart her progress are infuriating. Subrata’s humiliation – he seems almost physically paralysed by shame and suspicion of what his wife is up to when she’s at work – is upsetting. He persuades her to resign from her job the night before he finds out he’s lost his own. His contained pompous relief is thus followed by grotesque, hectic anxiety when Subrata arrives at the bank and has to fend off a crowd of angry investors who’ve lost their money. Satyajit Ray intercuts between the bank and the office of Arata’s boss Mr Mukherjee (Haradhan Banerjee), who is offering Arata a more responsible job (but no extra money) as she tries to summon up the courage to give him her resignation. Subrata’s desperate phone call, telling her not to quit, comes through to Mukherjee’s office in the nick of time and resourceful Arata successfully negotiates a rise. When she tells her husband at home that night, he’s both relieved and more deeply ashamed: the real strength of Anil Chatterjee’s performance is that he always suggests a consciousness on Subrata’s part of how shameful his feelings are. For me, the film’s ambivalence was sustained right to the end. Arati quits her job in protest at how the cheerfully brutal Mr Mukherjee has treated the one Anglo-Indian girl on the sales team. Arati’s and Subrata’s closeness to one another is restored and they disappear into the city crowd, both now looking for another job. But the reconciliation is edged with a sense that Subrata feels that things are already looking up: in spite of the alarming prospect of no money at all coming in from now on, the old balance of power can begin to be restored.
The lovely lead actress Madhabi Mukherjee registers emotions rather deliberately but this works very well – it serves to reinforce the unexpectedness to Arati of the things happening and of the insights occurring to her. Three other actresses impress in smaller roles: Vicky Redwood as Edith, the Anglo-Indian; Jaya Bhaduri as Arati’s daughter, Bani, who’s anxiously uncertain about whether to pursue her academic ambitions or to accept a traditional female role; and whoever plays the liveliest of the Indian girls on the sales team. (I can’t work this out from the IMDB cast list.) There’s an amusing sequence when this girl, Arati and the others chat about their door-to-door experiences; the description of social distinctions, particularly in a scene in which Arati makes a successful pitch, is incisive. Haradhan Banerjee is splendid as the savvy, unscrupulous Mukherjee and another actor whose name I can’t track down is vivid in a brief but important role as a man with whom Arati has a business meeting in a cafe. Subrata, hiding behind his newspaper, hears every word. Ray creates some fine, expressive images (the cinematographer was Subrata Mitra) and his dialogue is generally excellent. His source material is a short story by Narendranath Mitra. The plotting is occasionally melodramatic – Subrata’s bank going bust on the morning of Arata’s intended resignation etc – although this does make for a genuinely suspenseful ten minutes. The suggestions of a gathering storm outside Mukherjee’s office window, immediately before Arati clears the marital air through her eventual resignation, may be a little obvious but the effect is powerfully atmospheric.
20 August 2013