Pratidwandi (1971) - film review

Siddhartha is a 25-year-old graduate whose inability to find a job is slowly alienating him from the world around him.   Since he abandoned his training at medical school, he has drifted along, not knowing what he wants from life.  Siddhartha now lives in a crowded Calcutta apartment with his mother and two younger siblings.  He disapproves of his sister, who flirts with her boss to improve her career prospects, and is indifferent to his brother’s involvement with bomb-making revolutionaries.  One evening, he is called into a house by a young woman to help change a fuse.  The woman, Keya, shares Siddhartha’s dislike for middleclass conventionality and the two appear to be fated to fall in love.  But once again Siddhartha is unwilling to commit himself and, after another disastrous job interview, he leaves Calcutta to start a new life, in a poorer region of India.

The economic and social upheaval experienced by India in the early 1970s provided Satyajit Ray with the inspiration for his Calcutta Trilogy, in which he depicts young men struggling with the world of work at a time of mass unemployment and growing social unrest.   Pratidwandi (a.k.a. The Adversary) was the first instalment in this trilogy and was followed by Seemabaddha (Company Limited) (1971) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman) (1976).   Although less well-known outside India than Ray’s earlier films, the Calcutta Trilogy represents some of his best and most experimental work.   

Pratidwandi marks a significant stylistic shift from Ray’s previous films, so much so that it may have shocked and surprised contemporary audiences who had grown accustomed to his poetic flavour of neo-realism during the previous decade.   The film begins with a bizarre negative (photo-reversed) sequence which, as we subsequently learn, is an hallucinatory experience of the main character in the story.  Subsequently, the film adopts a crude social realist style that owes much to the French Wave tradition (particularly the work of Godard and Rivette), with aggressive jump-cutting, shaky camerawork and extensive location footage in the busy streets of the city.

The film’s unpolished cinéma vérité style suits its subject perfectly, since the story revolves around a confused young man who is torn between open rebellion and submissive conformity.  The conflict and unrest which the film’s hero sees in the world around him seem to mirror his own inner turmoil, and he ends up being unable to decide what he wants, freedom or servitude.  It is only when he realises how loathsome is the world he is expected to enter that Siddhartha feels able to make his decision and choose for himself the life he wants.

Pratidwandi is not Satyajit Ray’s most comfortable film to watch.  Its rough and ready feel gives it an austerity and bleakness that distance the spectator from the subject and, unusually for Ray, its harshness is not softened by poetic irony.  The frequent switching between the real world and that of the imagination is just as unsettling, even if this allows Ray to include some humourous surreal touches (such as the row of skeletons waiting patiently for an interview).  Although the film is stylistically challenging, it is as compelling as anything else that its director made.  As the drama builds to its searing climax, the plight of the young employed becomes tragically evident, although it takes a spellbinding central performance from Dhritiman Chatterjee to convey to us the harrowing reality of this predicament.

© James Travers 2010

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