The Big City review – Satyajit Ray’s miraculous look at a new world of possibility
The struggles and triumphs of a 1950s Kolkata family whose highest earner is a woman is told with marvellous lucidity in an optimistic masterpiece
Satyajit Ray’s magnificent movie from 1963 is now rereleased as part of a Ray retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, and what a pleasure to marvel again at this film’s freshness, its fluency, its directness, its powerful and essential optimism. Ray’s lucid storytelling always strikes me as a kind of miracle whenever I see this film. He makes the miracle look easy.
The setting is Kolkata in the early 1950s and Subrata Mazumdar (Anil Chatterjee) is the harassed employee of a bank which – though he doesn’t know it – is on the verge of going under. He is reasonably happy with his lot, with a humorous, distracted manner, often absent-mindedly smoking or eating during conversations. He lives with his wife Arati, whose sensitivity, sweetness and darting glances of insight are wonderfully portrayed by Ray’s great leading actress Madhavi Mukherjee. But their household is crowded: there is their young son Pintu (Prasenjit Sarkar), Subrata’s kid sister Bani (Jaya Bachchan) and also his elderly parents – mother (Sefalika Devi) and grumpy father (Haren Chatterjee), a retired teacher who is enviously obsessed with the fact that all his ex-pupils seem to be well off while he is ending his days hardly more than a pauper in the home of his not-particularly-well-off grownup son.
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