India is actually able to produce something else than the usual Bollywood glam. In the sixties a brilliant and rather European oriented filmmaker was producing quality movies. He was apparently very popular with the legendary street-photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and since he is my favorit photographer, I am going to check this director out. This is one of his first acclaimed outputs.
A housewife Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee) lives in a traditional three generation family house. The income of the husband is a little tight for the many inhabitants and she takes up a job as a sales-woman. This is not looked well upon by the rest of the family but she keeps going. Still a little in doubt at first - but as the gets used to it and also finds a few other female friends in the company, she prospers.
Her husband was initially supportive of her decision but as she gets more and more absorbed with her work and comes home with presents to the others, he starts to feel his position as the breadwinner and master of the house diminished by her. When he looses his work due to bank failure and she has the nerve to ask her boss for a 50% raise, he gets even more depressed.
She has left most of the work at home to her mother and her younger sister. When the husbands father tries to walk to the doctor on his own but falls down a staircase, he blames his son for not being able to support the family. She gets very popular with the boss at work and he is very friendly with her as he sees potential in her working effort.
After an evening when her boss drives her home to their place the husband seeks him out to figure out if his jealousy is founded in reality. He learns that the boss is in fact a reasonable and decent man and he even offers him a job. One of Arati´s colleagues has been away with sickness and when she returns to the office, she is fired by the boss. Arati is filled with anger over how she has been treated and since she knows the girl has been sick, she demands him to apologize to her. When he says no, Arati gives her resignation an leaves the office.
Down in the street she meets her husband who meets her with acceptance and support when she reveals that she has resigned from her job. He says he thinks she is brave and that they will figure out together how to proceed.
This is a fairly gynocentric movie in the sense that things goes a little too well for the beautiful and confident female lead, while her husband is slightly geeky, weak and beta male like. He has to be portraid as unable to take care of anything while she can easily get a job, get a raise and support the family in stead of him. The boss is being painted as a little slimy, not too obviously but he has to be calculated and then hard towards an employee to enable the lead to appear as a righteous defender of female virtues
the whole family is painted as weak and dependent to make the female lead look powerful and invincible. It is too much in my opinion and I am actually a little baffled that a movie from India from the early 1960s actually comes forth as so directly feminist politically correct. But then i suppose that India had its own version of a gynocentric welfare state going at this point that needed to cater to women´s egos.
It is a very gently flowing movie. It takes its time to build up the situation and makes sure that nothing is forced down your throat. There is still a lot of respect for family virtues and a good deal of positive vibes among the family members. I did get a sense that the wife was supposed to get her adventure a little out of hand and realize that she was stepping all over her husbands feelings, but she rather just feels pity for herself that he has moved away from her, when it is actually the other way around. He is shown as forgiving and even calling her brave for quitting her job. That was a slight anticlimax for me. I would have liked a tougher conflict to set things straight. But i guess the general portrayal of the characters did not lead that way.
The cinematography is gentle and soft. No sudden moves, except in a few cases when a character feels dizzy or sick and we see things through their eyes. It is not very artsy at all - only at a few occasions we get some shots that are more than just the basic flow of the plot. There is one scene though that surprised me and that is when she gets back to the boss to quit, because her colleague has been fired. The room and the boss suddenly gets a darker and more serious feel to it that kind of creeps up on you slowly. That was rather nice little trick.
The runtime is too long, it clocks in at a good two hours. And even though i like this sort of gentle therapeutic pace, it is too much for two hours. But again that is a minor negative. Overall it is a fine movie, without any particular outstanding aspects.
(all images are my own photos taken with an iPad directly at the TV screen. Use only with my permission)
Rating: 6/10
