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*** This review may contain spoilers ***
While I had seen a few Mrinal Sen movies before, and had high regard for him, I was stunned by this movie's impact on me - an impressionable 20-year old at that time. Yes, I was spellbound and intoxicated by its surrealism and psychedelic effects.It starts in the afternoon showing a decent but poor family in a run-down neighborhood in Calcutta. The surroundings faintly suggest days of long-lost glory vanishing into the inevitable decay and ruins, that somehow, still remain mysteriously impregnated by centuries of history. The only bread-earner of the family - one of the daughters, is expected to come beck home after work any time as usual, - but as she does not show up on this day, concern intensifies into worry, which becomes panic, which, in turn, turns to resignation as the night progresses....The entire movie unfolds within a time frame of around 12 hours or so and this intensification and progressive transformation of tension is reflected stunningly mostly in the body language and expressions of the family members with an economy of words and action which, to me, seemed to border on a research study of the body language of the inmates of a mental asylum. The use of Pink Floyd's music in depicting the psychological dynamics of the situation is very innovative. A very simple plot (almost no plot, really), but what execution!! I have seen many great movies, but trust me, they are just movies - this is something else!!Postscript: Mrinal Sen started with a reputation as a firebrand radical Marxist moviemaker, whose movies were often weighed down by excessive ideological baggage. I haven't seen too many of his movies but "Calcutta '71" (an earlier movie) left me confused. "Mrigaya" was a nice movie that seemed to me to be the first one of his without this very obvious, even overriding bias and with "Ekdin Pratidin", he seemed to have completely transformed himself. A few years later, I saw his "Khandhar" - which, I thought, was another masterpiece. Make no mistakes, anybody who could make "Ekdin Pratidin" and "Khandhar" is a genius, and if he hasn't got the same recognition as Satyajit Ray, a lot of movie buffs are just missing out.
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