It is a dark movie. By showing the story of a typical day, this film ravels the darkness of a lower-middle class family's daily routine, their dependency, their choices and their helplessness in the end. Gita Sen's arc is thrilling to watch and she stands strong to her role. And speaking about staying true to the character, Satya Bandyopadhyay just brilliantines here, may be this is one of his best performances. This can be a double feature along with Tapan Sinha's 'Atanka'.
3 Reviews
Life is Ugly
smrana9377-831-37163020 February 2011
Mrinal Sen has a sharp perception of the bitter realities experienced by the lower middle class, presumably born of personal experience. This one is pretty despairing.
We have a large family comprising three generations living in a tenement comprising a room or two. Many other family's are crowded into this congested bee-hive of a building, with people all but peering into each other's quarters and lives. There is a single tap which serves all tenants. Neighbors can be civil, helpful, interfering or judgmental. As the title implies, life is a continuous, repetitive and bitter struggle to make ends meet and to retain dignity and decencies in a rigid and unforgiving society. His Kharij is set in a similar if not the same group housing building.
Chinu (Mamata Shankar), the eldest of four siblings, is the sole earning member in the family. One day she fails to return home. What could have happened-was she held up at work, or involved in an accident, or, hard to imagine, is she seeing someone? The alarm mounts as the day deepens into night and soon the whole neighborhood are observers and participants, each with their own theories and surmises, mostly derogatory. Why do they have to send a daughter for work and depend on her earnings? Police are not helpful and there is a tense sequence where the younger brother visits the morgue to identify the dead bodies found by the authorities. Finally the family bonds explode in mutual recrimination and accusations.
This is certainly depressing material, perhaps unnecessarily so, but it should hit us in a vulnerable spot. If Ray soars in hope and optimism even as he portrays extremities of suffering, Sen's world is an insider's dreary and claustrophobic vision. He sees no glamor in the curse of poverty.
Mercifully, India has been changing dramatically since the film was made.
We have a large family comprising three generations living in a tenement comprising a room or two. Many other family's are crowded into this congested bee-hive of a building, with people all but peering into each other's quarters and lives. There is a single tap which serves all tenants. Neighbors can be civil, helpful, interfering or judgmental. As the title implies, life is a continuous, repetitive and bitter struggle to make ends meet and to retain dignity and decencies in a rigid and unforgiving society. His Kharij is set in a similar if not the same group housing building.
Chinu (Mamata Shankar), the eldest of four siblings, is the sole earning member in the family. One day she fails to return home. What could have happened-was she held up at work, or involved in an accident, or, hard to imagine, is she seeing someone? The alarm mounts as the day deepens into night and soon the whole neighborhood are observers and participants, each with their own theories and surmises, mostly derogatory. Why do they have to send a daughter for work and depend on her earnings? Police are not helpful and there is a tense sequence where the younger brother visits the morgue to identify the dead bodies found by the authorities. Finally the family bonds explode in mutual recrimination and accusations.
This is certainly depressing material, perhaps unnecessarily so, but it should hit us in a vulnerable spot. If Ray soars in hope and optimism even as he portrays extremities of suffering, Sen's world is an insider's dreary and claustrophobic vision. He sees no glamor in the curse of poverty.
Mercifully, India has been changing dramatically since the film was made.
With movies like this around, you wouldn't need any "controlled substances"!!
sbansban24 March 2002
Warning: Spoilers
While I had seen a few Mrinal Sen movies before, and had high regard for him, I was stunned by this movie's impact on me - an impressionable 20-year old at that time. Yes, I was spellbound and intoxicated by its surrealism and psychedelic effects.
It starts in the afternoon showing a decent but poor family in a run-down neighborhood in Calcutta. The surroundings faintly suggest days of long-lost glory vanishing into the inevitable decay and ruins, that somehow, still remain mysteriously impregnated by centuries of history. The only bread-earner of the family - one of the daughters, is expected to come beck home after work any time as usual, - but as she does not show up on this day, concern intensifies into worry, which becomes panic, which, in turn, turns to resignation as the night progresses....
The entire movie unfolds within a time frame of around 12 hours or so and this intensification and progressive transformation of tension is reflected stunningly mostly in the body language and expressions of the family members with an economy of words and action which, to me, seemed to border on a research study of the body language of the inmates of a mental asylum. The use of Pink Floyd's music in depicting the psychological dynamics of the situation is very innovative. A very simple plot (almost no plot, really), but what execution!! I have seen many great movies, but trust me, they are just movies - this is something else!!
Postscript: Mrinal Sen started with a reputation as a firebrand radical Marxist moviemaker, whose movies were often weighed down by excessive ideological baggage. I haven't seen too many of his movies but "Calcutta '71" (an earlier movie) left me confused. "Mrigaya" was a nice movie that seemed to me to be the first one of his without this very obvious, even overriding bias and with "Ekdin Pratidin", he seemed to have completely transformed himself. A few years later, I saw his "Khandhar" - which, I thought, was another masterpiece. Make no mistakes, anybody who could make "Ekdin Pratidin" and "Khandhar" is a genius, and if he hasn't got the same recognition as Satyajit Ray, a lot of movie buffs are just missing out.
It starts in the afternoon showing a decent but poor family in a run-down neighborhood in Calcutta. The surroundings faintly suggest days of long-lost glory vanishing into the inevitable decay and ruins, that somehow, still remain mysteriously impregnated by centuries of history. The only bread-earner of the family - one of the daughters, is expected to come beck home after work any time as usual, - but as she does not show up on this day, concern intensifies into worry, which becomes panic, which, in turn, turns to resignation as the night progresses....
The entire movie unfolds within a time frame of around 12 hours or so and this intensification and progressive transformation of tension is reflected stunningly mostly in the body language and expressions of the family members with an economy of words and action which, to me, seemed to border on a research study of the body language of the inmates of a mental asylum. The use of Pink Floyd's music in depicting the psychological dynamics of the situation is very innovative. A very simple plot (almost no plot, really), but what execution!! I have seen many great movies, but trust me, they are just movies - this is something else!!
Postscript: Mrinal Sen started with a reputation as a firebrand radical Marxist moviemaker, whose movies were often weighed down by excessive ideological baggage. I haven't seen too many of his movies but "Calcutta '71" (an earlier movie) left me confused. "Mrigaya" was a nice movie that seemed to me to be the first one of his without this very obvious, even overriding bias and with "Ekdin Pratidin", he seemed to have completely transformed himself. A few years later, I saw his "Khandhar" - which, I thought, was another masterpiece. Make no mistakes, anybody who could make "Ekdin Pratidin" and "Khandhar" is a genius, and if he hasn't got the same recognition as Satyajit Ray, a lot of movie buffs are just missing out.
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