The Big City

The big city in Satjayit Ray's 1963 film is Calcutta, the home of the Mazumdar family.  Many of the Indian director's films, at least for me, are a "hard sell" -- in synopsis, these pictures seem forbidding, dour, and socially conscious in a well-meaning, if obtuse, manner.  For instance, The Big City is primarily concerned with a woman's efforts to supplement her family's meager income by joining the work force.  The subject doesn't sound too promising, but Ray is a great film maker and he dramatizes his story's themes pictorially -- in fact, he's as great an inventor of compelling images as Fellini or Bergman.  From the outset, the way that things look in The Big City is compelling:  locations are so intensely imagined in space and texture that you can almost smell them.  An example of Ray's visual panache is the film's first image, an extended minimalist shot that underlies the film's titles:  we see a metallic arm gliding along a cable; at each point where the arm crosses a splice in the cable, there's a pop and a spark as electricity arcs -- we're seeing the electrical conductor that powers a street car.  Ray cuts to the inside of the street car and shows one of his protagonists, Bhobal, Mazumdar, the family's father, shot from an unflattering low-angle that emphasizes his jowls and weary expression.  (Ray's actors are very attractive, but he, often, conceals their handsomeness by filming them in unflattering, glamour-less close-ups or from camera angles that make his players seem heavier and older than, in fact, they are.)  Ray shows us the neighborhood where his character's live -- children are coming home from school and the streets are thronged with young boys.  Then, the director encloses us in a warren of small, hot-looking rooms, doorways hung with blankets to provide a semblance of privacy in the apartment that otherwise resounds with radios blaring and the noise of people in adjacent rooms.  This dwelling has a palpable presence and is as important as the characters in establishing the situation and milieu.

The Mazumdar family is lower middle-class.  Dad is employed as a clerk, a sort of customer relations liaison, in a bank.  He supports his elderly father and mother who live in their cramped apartment along with his wife, his little son, and teenage girl whom we learn to be Bhombol's little sister (this wasn't clear to me until late in the film).  Grandpa is a retired school teacher, a cross-word puzzle fanatic, and embittered (as well as pleased) by the fact that his pupils have succeeded in the world and have well-paying jobs while he lives in semi-poverty.  (The old man is nothing if not proud and, in one scene, we see him weeping when one of his students, a successful optometrist, offers to provide him with glasses free of charge).  Bhombol's little sister is a student who shows promise and she is studying for college admission exams; the cost of her tuition is a burden to the family.  Since the family is having trouble making ends meet, Arati, the family's mother, decides to seek employment outside of the home, a radical measure as far as her in-laws are concerned.  (The old schoolteacher and his wife are opposed but Mr. Mazumdar notes that their opposition will vanish as soon as the woman's first pay-check arrives.)  Arati gets a  job selling "knitting machines" (I assume these are what we would call "sewing machines") door to door in the upper class neighborhoods in town.  She's good at her work and earns not only a salary but commissions on sales.  Ray observes with tact and delicacy the young mother's nervousness at beginning her employment, her tenacity, and her sense of grief at leaving her family for the workplace (she obsesses over her small son's bath -- "even now," she says, "I would be giving him his bath"; she is with her husband riding to work on the street car.)  None of this may sound promising as cinematic material, but Ray's imagery is, often, astonishingly concrete and palpable -- a scene in which the characters dump sauce onto rice, roll it up with their fingers, and, then, eat it has a weird charge; this fundamental action, eating, dramatizes issues at play in the film.  Similarly, when Arati fills out her job application in English, she asks her husband (these people speak Bengali) if their last name is spelled in English with a "s or a z"; her husband says "z" as "in zoo", a comment that leads to the little boy misunderstanding (probably willfully) and demanding that his father take him to the zoo.  "Not now," Mr. Mazumdar says, "your papa's pockets are empty of money."  These are tiny details, but observed with a generous and probing intensity.

Arati's success selling "knitting machines" upsets just about everyone except Bhombol's mother who is predictably grateful for better food and gifts of "scented tobacco."  Arati's own father is upset that his daughter "has to work" and casts aspersions of Bhombol.  The simple fact is that Arati likes working, enjoys the camaraderie with other employees and likes interacting with her customers.  But Bhombol asks a friend to find him another job so that the family can pay its bills on his earnings alone.  And he demands that Arati resign her job.  She is about to submit her letter of resignation when Bhombol's fly-by-night bank collapses (the aggrieved customers beat him up in the street) and she becomes the sole bread-winner.  Arati's friend at work, Ellen, is an "Anglo-Indian --that is, her parents were an Indian and English couple.  Apparently, this group of people is pretty much universally despised in India as being neither fish nor fowl, a kind of contemptible half-breed. Discrimination against Ellen manifests itself in various ways -- for instance, she is paid in filthy, crumpled bills while Arati is given clean, sweet-smelling cash.  When Ellen falls sick, Arati has to work over-time to cover for her and, in fact, is given a significant raise.  Arati's boss wants her to become a supervisor of the female sales force and offers her a big raise.  Arati's increasing success at work seriously threatens Bhombol's already fragile ego -- he's now unemployed, just sitting in the apartment smoking cheap cigarettes.  Arati, by contrast, is strutting around the city wearing big sunglasses, with (horror of horrors!) lipstick on her lips.  The old schoolteacher has taken to making the rounds of his former students and aggressively cadging money from them -- he's become a first-rate nuisance and pain in the ass, particularly because he acts entitled to the money that he begs.  He collapses climbing a long flight of steps up to a doctor's office, another successful student has his consultation suite at the top of these purgatorial stairs.  (Some of the old doctor's offices in Austin were above retail establishments on Main Street and accessed by horrible steps that no sick person, nor any infirm elderly man or woman, could navigate -- apparently, the situation was the same in Calcutta in the early sixties.)  The old man doesn't die and will recover and he's become reconciled to Arati's employment outside of the home.  Bhombol goes to see Arati's boss to ask if he can find him a job -- the two men bond over cigarettes and exude casual, condescending sexism toward the female workers.  Mr. Mukkerjee tells Bhombol to come back at 5:00 pm so that they can jointly prospect among his business contacts for a  job -- both men are from the same area in Bengal it's the Bengali old boy network in action.  A big storm is (literally) brewing and we see dark clouds and hear thunder rumbling.  Mukkerjee fires Ellen, the Anglo-Indian girl, and, then, boasts about it to Arati:  "Our ex-rulers left behind quite a clan, didn't they?"  Arati is naive enough to expect justice in the work-place and demands that her boss apologize to Ellen for insulting her.  Mukkerjee is enraged, but before he can fire Arati, she quits.  Down on the street, Arati runs into Bhombol who is  coming to the office for his meeting with Mukkerjee.  Arati tells Bhombol that she has quit.  Oddly enough, both of them feel liberated and closer to one another than they were before.  Arati says:  "It's a big city and we can both find jobs."  The camera cranes back and we see them walking together down the crowded street and, then, lost among the people in the teeming metropolis.  In the foreground, a streetcar glides by on its rail, sparking at the connections between electrical cables, and the bulb of an electric lamp begins to glow.

In all respects, the film is a masterpiece, probably one of the most incisive movies ever made about the workplace.  If a Martian were to judge human beings by their movies, that creature would conclude that people spent most of their time murdering each other, plotting elaborate crimes, or engaging in sexual affairs.  In fact, most of human life is devoted to working, although movies almost never show this aspect of our existence.  (The only other example that immediately comes to mind is Ermanno Olmi's wonderful Il Posto ("The Job").0  Because of the picture's documentary elements, we learn a number of interesting things about life in a big city in India -- women take great pride in their culinary accomplishments, particularly in making curry; Bengali's speak to one another in confidence using English phrases and like to lard their speech with British cliches.  Upper class Bengalis are very polite to door-to-door sales women and Indian men are poor drivers.  The way things look is part of the film's appeal.  All the locations are completely convincing -- the Anglo-Indian girl lives in a musty Victorian space filled with knick-knacks and has a ghostly, defeated mother (there's a picture of Clark Gable on the wall).  Several key scenes take place in a small, spotlessly clean toilet (marked "toilet" on the door) in the building downtown where Mr. Mukkerjee has his firm.  Ray is completely unsentimental -- the old English teacher is a nasty, arrogant, bully.  (I am reminded of the sinister and ancient granny in Pather Panchali who eats more than her fair share of the peasant family's food.)  Ray's neo-realist mise-en-scene is continuously complicated by shots that have expressionistic implications:  when Arati''s disgraceful tube of lipstick is found, her little son, who is blowing bubbles, sprays her with a cloud of them, all bursting disconsolately.  Bhombol's profile cast on a mosquito screen seems grotesque and menacing.  Arati's confusion between whether she is a mother and home-maker or a working girl is reflected in mirrors that literally divide her into two figures.  The acting is all beyond reproach and Ray refuses to simplify his characters into types -- the blowhard Mr. Mukkerjee is also generous and very kind (to those he likes); Ellen, the hapless Anglo-Indian girl, is just a little too cavalier about her job and, in fact, there's a suggestion that she really isn't much of an employee.  When the old man begs for money from one of  his former students, the doctor's wife is anxious to go to a movie and keeps gesturing at her wristwatch while the old school  teacher rambles on bombastically about his poverty.  Later, the woman says something like:  "I can't believe he would come to beg like that."  The doctor replies  "He's Bengali and that's how Bengali's do things."  The film is about two hours and 15 minutes long and excellent throughout.  Cross-cutting builds suspense in the scene in which Arati is about to quit while her husband is being thrashed on the street for the failure of the bank where he works.  Oddly, enough Ray builds so much suspense by the ancient technique of cross-cut parallel action that the scene is as thrilling (and seems to have higher stakes) than most car chases or murders committed in Hollywood movies.  The film that that the picture most resembles is Griffith's picture about inflation in Germany after World War One, Isn't Life Wonderful!