75 Years of Contemporary Films: Mahanagar (The Big City)

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

” … no film by Ray should be missed, and Mahanagar has all the warmth, intimacy and perception one expects of him.” Financial Times

Runtime: 136 minutes Director: Satyajit Ray Cast: Anil Chatterjee, Madhavi Mukherjee, Jaya Bachchan, Haren Chatterjee, Sefalika Devi, Prasenjit Sarkar, Haradhan Bannerjee, Vicky

Country: India Year: 1964

Rating: (PG)

Phoenix Classics

Director: Satyajit Ray

Cast: Anil Chatterjee, Madhavi Mukherjee, Jaya Bachchan, Haren Chatterjee, Sefalika Devi, Prasenjit Sarkar, Haradhan Bannerjee, Vicky