The Big City / Mahanagar (1963) [The Criterion Collection #668]

The Big City (Mahanagar), Indian auteur Satyajit Ray’s tenth feature, was his first to be set in an urban milieu in the then-present day. All of his previous films had been set in rural areas, often in Bengali, and/or took place in the recent past, usually the late 19th or early 20th century. The Big City, on the other hand, is set in Kolkata/Calcutta, at the time India’s most populous city, in the mid-1950s, and it deals directly with pertinent social issues of the time, particularly the role of women in a traditional society that is rapidly modernizing. The idea of married women going to work marked a significant rupture in orthodox Indian society at the time, something of which Ray was acutely aware, having grown up with a widowed mother who had no choice but to return to work to support her family.

The film’s protagonists are a young, lower-middle-class married couple, Subrata and Arati Mazumder (Anil Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee). Subrata has a respectable office job working at a bank, but it does not bring in enough money each month to fully support them, their five-year-old son Pintu (Prasenjit Sarkar), and the extended family who lives with them, including Subrata’s father and mother (Haren Chatterjee and Sefalika Devi) and his teenage sister Bani (Jaya Bhaduri). They live in a cramped, dim apartment and often struggle to make ends meet from month to month, which is why Arati suggests that perhaps she should take a job, as well. Subrata is reluctant at first, but once he realizes what a second paycheck would do for them, he is able to set aside his traditional beliefs about women’s primary responsibility being in the home and help Arati find a job. On the other hand, Subrata’s father, Priyogopal, a retired schoolteacher in failing health who represents the older generation, is staunchly opposed and refuses to accept the idea of his daughter-in-law going to work every day, rather than staying home and looking after the domestic responsibilities.

Arati finds a job doing door-to-door sales for a company that manufactures knitting machines, which underscores the changing face of domesticity in the modern world as household labor is increasingly automated. Her boss, Himangshu Mukherjee (Haradhan Bannerjee), is impressed with her effort and dedication, although she and the other women with whom she works have to constantly advocate for fair pay, including a share of the sales commissions. Arati befriends Edith (Vicky Redwood), an Anglo-Indian who speaks mostly English and introduces her to lipstick, a symbol of modern femininity that is forbidden in Arati’s more traditional worldview. Because Edith is Anglo-Indian and therefore a living embodiment of British colonialism, Mukherjee is prejudiced against her, complaining to Arati when Edith is chosen by the other saleswomen to ask for better pay. Mukherjee is a complicated figure, both sympathetic as an understanding boss and detestable as a man of unquestioned bigotry (a social issue that was, incidentally, rarely raised in Indian cinema at the time, making this a particularly daring film). He is quite generous with Arati, giving her an early raise when Subrata’s bank unexpectedly folds, leaving him without employment, yet his ethnic bias against Edith leads him to act unfairly.

As with most of Ray’s other films, The Big City is a complex, but ultimately generous depiction of humanity trying to navigate the uncertainties of a changing world. Each of the characters embodies both values and flaws, and Ray (who based his screenplay on several stories by Bengali writer and poet Narendranath Mitra) treats both sides with understanding and humanity. Arati, for example, is in many ways the film’s most noble character. She is kind, self-sacrificing, dutiful, and honest; yet, she is also impulsive, driven by her emotions to make rash decisions that, while morally right, potentially endanger her family’s stability. Similarly, Subrata is a good husband and father, although he is hindered at times by his insecure masculinity, as he feels threatened by Arati’s professional success (especially after he loses his job) and clearly worries that she will leave him for someone else.

Ray builds the narrative with a steady assuredness, drawing us into the characters and their intermingled hopes and fears about economic security and the changing face of gender roles. Because we like them as people, we hope for the best for them, even though Ray dangles the constantly possibility of everything falling apart at the seams, which it very nearly does at the end. Yet, Ray finds a way to focus our attention on the silver lining, ending the film on a note of hope even though Subrata and Arati are essentially walking off into an unseen future, swallowed up by a crowd on the big city street that is meant to symbolize all the grand possibilities of modern life, but just as easily could represent the suffocation of individuality amid the masses.

QNetwork

"The Big City," which has crept quietly into Chicago, is one of the most rewarding screen experiences of our time. I warmly encourage you to see it.

The power of this extraordinary film seems to come in equal parts from the serene narrative style of director Satyajit Ray and the sensitive performances of the cast members. At a time when we are engaged in the annual ritual of choosing our "best actress," it might be useful to see the performance of Madhabi Mukherjee in this film. She is a beautiful deep, wonderful actress who simply surpasses all ordinary standards of judgment.

She plays Arati, a young housewife. The household consists of her husband (Anil Chatterjee), their children and his parents. His salary as a bank clerk is not enough to go around, and after a great deal of thought, the couple decides that Arati must find a job. The parents react with shame; no self-respecting man should allow his wife to work. But times have changed.

Arati takes a job demonstrating a knitting machine. The job provides her first real contact with other social levels, and she learns with hesitation to use lipsticks, wear dark glasses and talk without shyness. But there are problems in the home that Ray handles with tact and humor. The old father declares "cold war" on his son and will not speak to him. The husband must reconcile his self-respect with his wife's new status as a breadwinner.

The remarkable thing that Ray accomplishes is to make us really deeply care about the fortunes of this simple family. We can see why it is necessary that the wife work, that the father be reconciled, that the husband and wife understand each other. By contrast, when "Our Man Flint" sets out to save the world from catastrophe it matters not at all, because we don't for a moment believe in Flint or his catastrophe.

That is why I have so much trouble approaching Ray's films as "foreign." They are not foreign. They are about Indians, and I am not an Indian, but Ray's characters have more in common with me than I do the comic-strip characters of Hollywood.

Ray's people have genuine emotions and ambitions, like the people next door and the people in Peoria and the people in Kansas City. There is not a person reading this review who would not identify immediately and deeply with the characters in "The Big City."

By contrast, Hollywood films with exploding cigarette lighters and gasping starlets and idiot plots are the real "foreign" films. They have nothing at all in common with us, and Satyajit Ray of India understands us better than Jerry Lewis.

Roger Ebert

Special Features:
- New, restored 2K digital film transfer and New English subtitle translation

DISC ONE:
- The Film
- New interview with actor Madhabi Mukherjee (16:32)
- Satyajit Ray and the Modern Woman, a new interview with Ray scholar Suranjan Ganguly (22:24)
- Satyajit Ray (1974), a documentary short by B. D. Garga (13:34)

DISC TWO:
- The Coward (Kapurush (1965), IMDB, 69 min), a short feature by Ray that also addresses modern female identity and stars Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee