There isn’t an immediate cure to indoctrination or ignorance. The only way out is to start questioning the status quo. If your questions are pertinent, and you’re obsessed with finding the truth, you must be also open minded to accept the forthcoming answers and strong enough to take a new path, if necessary.
"This quicksilver, un-pin-downable quality makes Mrinal Sen endearing. You can see it in his films too. Take the first of his city trilogy Interview (followed in turn by Calcutta 71 and Padatik). It was made around the same time as Satyajit Ray's Pratidwandi, and with the same theme of an unemployed young man, but there the similarity ends. While Ray's film follows a classic, subtle path of satire, Sen has stylistic devices ricocheting off the screen, not always making hits, but eager and robust. They question and castigate the socio-political system, unable to extricate itself from its feudal, regressive, post-colonial shackles. He demands reappraisals of individual and community.
In the film the young man fails to get the job, because along the way he is caught up willy-nilly in a street demonstration and loses the suit he had borrowed for the interview. How can he make an impression without it? Sen records gleefully that he even made his protagonist speak a line from Ray's film that had come to him through the grapevine, but modified to suit his purpose. Interestingly, Sen had the Pratidwandi debutant Dhritiman Chaterji play a young extremist in Padatik, committed to party ideals but disillusioned with the smug leaders. The overtly political film spewed debates and controversies for critiquing Left leadership.
The trilogy also testifies to the filmmaker's deep devotion to Calcutta (Kolkata). He had been dispatched to the metropolis at age 17 to study physics, from hometown Faridpur, now in Bangladesh, where he was born (1923) among seven brothers and five sisters. The city's milling crowds, its apathy and anonymity, instilled fear in the country lad, who underwent arrest and inquiry for suspected links with the underground movement. The terror was soon replaced by love. Although he never lost his feeling for rural, village life, and has made films on even marginalised tribal people facing unspeakable injustice as in Mrigaya and Oka Orie Katha (Telugu), Calcutta became Mrinal Sen's home."
Excerpts from World Within, World Without
Mrinal Sen: Padatik- The Guerrilla Fighter (Youtube)
Satyajit Ray: Pratidwadi- The Adversary (Youtube)
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