A sense of finality marks Satyajit Ray’s early Bengali films , the feeling of an impeccably arranged piece of music or a poem perfect down ...
A sense of finality marks Satyajit Ray’s early Bengali films, the feeling of an impeccably arranged piece of music or a poem perfect down to the last syllable. But by the 1960s, Ray’s cinema had started to reflect the social and political ferment that bubbled around the filmmaker in his native Kolkata. Mahanagar (1963), about a housewife who enters the workplace causing domestic turmoil, Nayak (1966), starring Uttam Kumar as a troubled movie star and Aranyer Din Ratri (1969), about a group of friends who head out for adventure and encounter misadventure instead, diverged from the previous productions. They explored doubt, ambiguity, disquiet and the disappearance of moral sureties.
The tensions spilled over in Pratidwandi, made in 1971 and adapted from a novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay. Ray vividly crystallised the dilemma between the political and the personal through the story of Siddharta, an unemployed graduate who finds himself a reluctant combatant in an undeclared war.
Unable to leap into the radical Left movement that surrounds him but equally unwilling to succumb to consumerist impulses, Siddhartha tries to balance his Brahminical morality with the new values of a city that is spinning in all directions. Siddhartha’s restlessness and nervous energy find expression through the storytelling idiom, which includes jittery handheld camerawork, tense...
