The Big City (1963)

 Satyajit Ray's "The Big City"

Based on a novel by Narendranath Mitra, Satyajit Ray's 1963 film "The Big City" centers on a conservative middle-class Bangali family shaken up by one of its women taking a job in the city. Taking place in the early 1950s, the film reflects upon the growing economic and social taking place and how it affects modern Indian social dynamics and roles. 

Satyajit Ray is typically interested in the domestic life of Indian families and how that domesticity is directly related to social, political, and economic change. With "The Big City," he explores how economic necessity creates the new world dynamics, as women in the workplace break the mold of conservative structures. Even more so, our protagonist - Arati - begins to grow in confidence as she becomes the primary earner of her household. This confidence boost disrupts the patriarchal mindset of the family members, as well as eventually the patriarchal mechanism of industry itself (by the film's end). 

Of course, Ray does not feel the need to shake up the narrative in any way with experimental or abstract filmmaking. It is never traditionally his style to do so, nor does the story require it. "The Big City" breezes by with unwaving steadiness, captivating you not with its own sense of excitement, but with the minute noticing of atmospheric changes in the relationships on screen. Ray's ability to cozy up his films with domesticity lends itself to that coziness being shaken up by his small, but dramatic changes.

"The Big City" is a modern tale of a changing landscape in India and its everflowing chain-of-effects it has on society, the family, and the individual. The new modernity of the 20th century unravels before our characters with results that shake up the foundations of its beliefs and comforts - ushering in a new world uncertain to its participants.