Satyajit Ray’s magnificent movie from 1963 is now rereleased as part of a Ray retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, and what a pleasure to marvel again at this film’s freshness, its fluency, its directness, its powerful and essential optimism. Ray’s lucid storytelling always strikes me as a kind of miracle whenever I see this film. He makes the miracle look easy.
The setting is Kolkata in the early 1950s and Subrata Mazumdar (Anil Chatterjee) is the harassed employee of a bank which – though he doesn’t know it – is on the verge of going under. He is reasonably happy with his lot, with a humorous, distracted manner, often absent-mindedly smoking or eating during conversations. He lives with his wife Arati, whose sensitivity, sweetness and darting glances of insight are wonderfully portrayed by Ray’s great leading actress Madhavi Mukherjee. But their household is crowded: there is their young son Pintu (Prasenjit Sarkar), Subrata’s kid sister Bani (Jaya Bachchan) and also his elderly parents – mother (Sefalika Devi) and grumpy father (Haren Chatterjee), a retired teacher who is enviously obsessed with the fact that all his ex-pupils seem to be well off while he is ending his days hardly more than a pauper in the home of his not-particularly-well-off grownup son.
Keenly aware of the need for more housekeeping money, Arati upends everything her menfolk know about life. She boldly applies for and gets a job as a door-to-door saleswoman, ringing on doorbells and encouraging the lady of the house to buy from her a state-of-the-art knitting machine, with which, she promises, you can run up a jumper in an hour. (The firm is evidently the Kolkata franchise of a western company, Autoknit, whose white models are up on posters in the city’s branch office.)
After a nervous start, the smart and personable Arati is a huge success: she is the star of this movie and now the star of her own breadwinning family life, much admired by her grinning boss Mr Mukherjee (Haradhan Bannerjee). Encouraged by her flighty new best friend at work, an Anglo-Indian woman called Edith (Vicky Redwood), Arati uses lipstick and becomes a modern woman about town in sunglasses. Meanwhile, her husband is thoroughly humiliated and emasculated by his wife’s sensational triumph; her father-in-law is increasingly hostile for the same reasons, and Arati’s success accelerates his own depression. This creates a diplomatic froideur with Subrata, whose mother also disapproves of the upstart new job. In an attempt to defend Arati, Subrata says: “Do you know what Bernard Shaw says about working women …? Oh … forget it.” (I always wonder what Subrata was about to quote. Perhaps it was: “The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.”)
The poor ailing old dad, perhaps out of some masochistic need to prove to himself how well the young people are doing and how poor he is, tours the city in the burning sun asking for favours from his old pupils. From one, an ophthalmologist, he begs for new glasses, after uneasily turning over the pages of Esquire in this man’s waiting room, with its racy pictures of young European women.
Mukherjee’s luminous performance as Arati, at once modest and sensual, is an absolute treat, perhaps especially when she is paid for the first time. In the ladies’ bathroom she takes the crisp, new notes out of the pay-packet and fans them under her nose, inhaling and smiling inscrutably at herself in the mirror. What is she thinking? Perhaps it is: this is what independence feels like; this is what a new world of possibility feels like.
The men feel it too, in a very different way. Arati is earning as much as them and more, and her work is enjoyable and exciting and modern. No wonder they resent it. Disaster looms, but Arati and Subrata are to be romantically reconciled and her wonderful final lines are: “Such a big city … so many different jobs … surely one of us can find a job!” The big city is the hero, not the villain, of the story: a place where they can start afresh.
• The Big City is released on 22 July in cinemas.
