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The Big City (Satyajit Ray, 1963)
🕑 Added 2021-05-30 01:03:09 +0000 UTC
Although they are very different directors, something about Ray has been reminding me of Ozu. Of course part of it pertains to the overarching themes of their respective bodies of work. Both men, in their unique ways, are analyzing the pull in their cultures between modernity and tradition. Judging from the films themselves, and the history surround them to some extent, this crisis has a rather different valence than it does / did in the West. Changes in capitalism are necessitating changes in values and mores, and while this was certainly true in the postwar years in, say, the U.S. and the U.K., Ray and Ozu subtly suggest that conservatives in India and Japan can perceive shifts like greater gender equality as Western imports, if not outright infiltrations.
The Big City is by far the most interesting of the Ray films I've viewed this month, primarily because it doesn't imply that the family under examination is somehow mythical or iconic in its ordinariness. Much like in Tokyo Story, The Big City articulates a web of complex but comprehensible relationships, between family members and between the family and the larger world. The film is primarily about Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), the young Bengali housewife who bucks tradition by taking employment outside the home. But this decision becomes a catalyst for a number of other people, forcing them to come to terms with their own subject positions.
There is Arati's husband Subrata (Anil Chatterjee), a midlevel manager at a local bank. He is not making ends meet, and so he reluctantly permits Arati to take a job selling sewing machines on commission. But when Subrata's bank collapses and he is out of a job, we find out just what he's made of. He is a character poised between patriarchy and practicality, recognizing that unlike his father (Haren Chatterjee), he cannot support a family on a single salary. While the presence of his disapproving father makes him doubt himself, and aggravates his wounded pride, Subrata also understands that he and Arati living in a very different economic reality. This tacit awareness, of course, does not prevent him from feeling as if his predicament is a personal failure.
As for Subrata's father, it becomes evident that his harsh judgment of Subrata and Arati is only partly a result of his old fashioned values. A retired teacher, Priyogopal has money problems of his own, and is plagued by jealousy that his former pupils have been more successful than he ever was. Again, times have changed, and British colonial rule remains in living memory for these people. But instead of recognizing structural inequality, the old teacher is simply bitter that he hasn't gotten what he feels he's earned.
Ray is careful to evenly distribute his attention across multiple characters and locales. Priyogopal goes begging to his former students. Subrata reluctantly holds down the home front. And above all, Arati becomes very successful at her job, giving her a new sense of purpose. Although Ray seems to support the image of Arati as smart and capable, The Big City also shows how the new Indian capitalism has its own structural imperatives. They just happen to work in Arati's favor. The company boss (Haradhan Bannerjee) likes Arati because she fits his image of the proper Bengali woman: resourceful but deferential. By contrast, Arati's friend and coworker Edith (Vicky Redwood) is an Anglo-Indian, and the boss treats her as if she were a living avatar of the legacy of colonialism.
The Big City isn't formally showy. But it is a film of contrasting textures. The clean, fluorescent-lit sales office is quite different from the older, darker bank where Subrata worked. And both spaces are visually and spatially distinguished from the family home. It seems to be a large house, with several distinct rooms for its six denizens -- Arati and Subrata, his father and mother (Sefalika Devi), his younger sister (Jaya Badhuri), and the couple's son (Prosenjit Sarkar). But Ray doesn't clearly delineate how the different spaces fit together. Textured walls and traditional draperies collide with more contemporary fixtures, suggesting that modernity will gradually transform this family, like it or not. Ray details this period of transition with complete generosity, understanding that this is less a clash of ideologies (residual vs. emergent) than the emotional jostling of a group of people, all struggling to secure their own place in the world.
