Satyajit Ray’s classic exploration of the problems for women in Indian society, told with his trademark humanity and with a wonderful central performance by Madhabi Mukherjee.
Arati, the wife of a bank clerk, is forced to take the initiative as bread-winner when her husband loses his job. This reversal of roles creates great conflict within the family. To everyone’s surprise, Arati is a great success; she becomes the favourite of the boss and is soon promoted to head saleswoman. With her new status comes an independence which Arati has never before experienced and which gradually becomes a necessity to her.
She makes friends with an Anglo-Indian colleague and when her friend is victimised because of her race, flies to her rescue. It is during this incident, when a moral stand is forced upon her, that Arati becomes fully aware of what it means to be responsible for one’s own actions…
Out of this disarmingly simple tale, Ray has fashioned a superlative quiet epic, an eloquent testimonial to the innate courage of ordinary people caught in the complex shifting society of urban Indian life.
No filmmaker is more important to the history of Contemporary Films than Satyajit Ray; Contemporary’s release of ‘The Apu Trilogy’ (Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansur) were important offerings at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street during the key period for foreign cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Charles and Kitty Cooper, who enjoyed personal relations with Ray and his family, distributed many of his subsequent films and later helped found the Satyajit Ray Foundation which provided scholarships to new filmmakers.
Writer and researcher Manishita Dass will introduce the film, its themes and place within Ray’s oeuvre.
“Ray details the conflicts which beset the family with much gentle humour, pinpointing the nuances of conversation with an unobtrusive perceptiveness that reminds one of Chekov. From his study of a single family and its difficulties, trivial and serious alike, there emerges a microcosm of India today, the twentieth century inexorably imposing itself on a way of life still steeped in the taboos of tradition. But if Mahanagar is an acutely observed reflection of one nation’s struggles to come to terms with modernity, it also has a universality which confirms Ray as one of the great artists of humanist cinema.”
The Guardian
“Madhabi Mukherjee is at the heart of all that is best in Mahanagar: her performance seems to me irreproachable, shifting from timidity into pleased confidence, always with a kind of pained pose. The film, of course, is ‘about’ conflicts between young and old India, fledgling flights and wounded pride, the emancipation of women who aren’t entirely sure they want it. Mercifully, like any film by Ray, its ‘aboutness’ is properly buried in an ‘itness’. The context and contours are too rich for paraphrase: Miss Mukherjee supremely epitomises them.”
New Statesman
” … no film by Ray should be missed, and Mahanagar has all the warmth, intimacy and perception one expects of him.”
Financial Times
“It is refreshing to see a film about nobility of temperament in such graceful, genuine and forthright terms; and good for once to get away from cynical and dollar principles. How many directors could have done it without appearing sentimental, trite or old-fashioned. it remains a real pleasure to see again, if only to be reminded that all the thrashing about for novelty or form and fashion is no substitute for the charm of character in action.”
Daily Telegraph
MAHANAGAR / Satyajit Ray / India / 1963 / 131 mins
Manishita Dass is Reader in Film & Global Media at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research explores intersections of film, political, and literary cultures in South Asia. Her publications include Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India (Oxford University Press) & The Cloud-Capped Star (BFI Film Classics / Bloomsbury). She is currently writing a book about the cinematic afterlives of the Indian left cultural movement of the 1940s, and co-editing, with Usha Iyer, a collection of essays on the Indian New Wave.