The Adversary (1970)
Cast: Dhritiman Chatterjee, Asgar Ali, Arabinda Banerjee
Director: Satyajit Ray
Country: India
Genre: Drama
Official Site: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for TIFF’s The Sun and the Moon: The Films of Satyajit Ray. For more information on upcoming TIFF film series visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.
Everywhere in the sweltering concrete expanses of Calcutta, men and women are competing for precious few jobs, candidates strictly vetted by their political affiliations, ideological preferences, and proficiency in English. Such exacting standards can only thrive in an environment where workers vastly outnumber available jobs, giving employers the power to shape the cultural landscape as they decide the social norms through casual discrimination. Meanwhile, potential workers are becoming weary of competing for substandard wages and continual dehumanization by boards of apathetic reviewers and are eventually pushed past their breaking point as the crowded city becomes a boiling pot of revolutionary fervor and its enraged citizens are pushed to violent action in the absence of social justice. Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi captures a time in Calcutta’s history when the conditions had reached critical mass and follows the story of Siddhartha Chaudhuri, a young man pushed beyond his limits after losing a father and suffering the indignities associated with finding a job in Calcutta during the early 1970s.
The first film in a series that would become known as Ray’s “Calcutta trilogy”, Pratidwandi is one of the filmmaker’s most incendiary films …
The first film in a series that would become known as Ray’s “Calcutta trilogy”, Pratidwandi is one of the filmmaker’s most incendiary films as it captured the unrest of Bengal as it was happening and showed sympathy toward the young Maoists of the “Naxalite” movement that has been percolating steadily for over 47 years. The film captures the bustling streets of Calcutta with discomforting proximity, placing the camera inside of buses overflowing with riders all headed to the same job interviews and on impassable street corners vibrating with incessant traffic. It is only through dreams and the occasional meandering thought that our young protagonist transcends the confines of the raging urban maelstrom, but instead of offering an escape these brief respites from the concerns of the day plague Siddhartha by confronting him with memories of past failures and images of death.
… Ray examines the conditions that lead to these breaking points without judging those forced into revolutionary action by the absence of social justice
These waking dreams and sleeping nightmares are brought to life through negative exposure that amplify the surface cracks and renders reality into a twisted and exaggerated version of itself that gives imperfections no hiding place. These stylistic flourishes are sparsely implemented and counterbalance the stark realism with dreamlike surrealism not unlike Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados (1950) where younger characters face a dearth of social justice and opportunity in an equally formidable landscape. Siddhartha is haunted by waking nightmares of his father’s death alongside unwanted memories of his brief stint in medical school as the burden of “what-if” plagues his soul with countless questions and unceasing self-doubt. Ray also uses spatial positioning to show the characters’ lack of control over their environment, imprisoning them behind bars formed by window dressings like a Kenji Mizoguchi protagonist trapped by the deep focus frames crafted around them as they remain blameless and woefully ignorant of the inescapable prisons that they occupy.
Pratidwandi finds Satyajit Ray at his most directly politicized as he captures political turmoil amidst the seething decay of an overpopulated Calcutta as intelligent and qualified young men and women were forced into dehumanizing circumstances in the hopes of finding employment opportunities. The human soul can only be tread upon so heavily before it erupts into violent action, and Ray examines the conditions that lead to these breaking points without judging those forced into revolutionary action by the absence of social justice.
Pratidwandi finds Satyajit Ray at his most directly politicized as he captures political turmoil amidst the seething decay of an overpopulated Calcutta as intelligent and qualified young men and women were forced into dehumanizing circumstances in the hopes of finding employment opportunities.
