Synopsis
Ranjit (Ranjit Mullick), a lower middle-class
young man, gets an opportunity to appear
for an interview in a multinational firm.
His uncle (Sekhar Chatterjee) has used his
connections and the job is almost assured.
His uncle had advised him to wear a proper
western suit to impress his future bosses.
On the day of his interview Ranjit is unable
to get his suit from the dry-cleaners as
the laundry workers’ union has called
a strike. After frantic efforts he manages
to borrow a suit from a friend but unfortunately
misplaces it during fracas in a tram involving
a pickpocket. He goes to the interview dressed
in the traditional dhoti-kurta and for obvious
reasons get summarily rejected. Frustration,
anger and protest follow…
The film
Interview is the first of the
three films - Calcutta
'71 (1972) and Padatik (1973)
being the other two - Mrinal
Sen made in the early 1970s which are
often collectively referred to as the 'Calcutta
Trilogy.' Influenced by the tumultuous spirit
of the time and the milieu, these films
move away from the comforts of realistic
narrative and attempt to analyse and castigate
the socio-political system that leads to
poverty and misery. The films also reflect
the anger such deprivation generates and
also the counter-reactions to such rebellion.
The three films are also integrally rooted
in the culture and geography of Calcutta
– which provides a constant foundation
of intellectual, political, social and audio-visual
stimulation for the filmmaker.
 Interview
is a film with a thin and straight forward
plot - Ranjit’s pursuit for the all–important
western-style suit that will endow him with
what his benefactor uncle Sekhar describes
as 'smartness' apt for an employee of the
Scottish managed mercantile firm. On the
day of his interview, Ranjit discovers that
he cannot get his suit from the dry cleaners
as the workers' union has called a wild-cat
strike. Using his frenetic attempt to find
a suitable suit as its basic premise the
film puts together a diverse range of sound
and images – news-reel footage, still
photographs, pages of magazines, candid
camera shots of the city, expressive music
and sounds – in an attempt to arrive
at a thematic structure bound by a political
ideology that propagates change and rebellion
within the framework of Marxism. The plot
of Interview thus serves as an
excuse to arrange the fragments of cinema
in order to, as Sen remarked, "depict
the all-pervasiveness of the colonial legacy
… and the need for political, social
and economic change." In fact,
so strong is the director’s endeavour
to do away with the realistic idiom of cinema
and the expectations of wish-fulfilment
it creates that Interview does
not show it’s central and defining
event– namely the dhoti-kurta clad
protagonist’s interview with his sahib
and brown sahib employers. Instead three
questions from the interview are inserted
along with the visuals of the corresponding
optical soundtrack in the title sequence
of the film.
The film’s prologue – a collage
of newsreel footage accompanied by ominous
background music - of statues of colonial
masters being uprooted by giant cranes stands
as a metaphor of transfer of power and firmly
establishes the context of the story that
would follow. After the title sequence the
film operates within a somewhat realistic
framework but the sequences are episodic
and sparse – they serve the purpose
of merely illustrating the basics of the
story. Instead of endeavouring to develop
characters and provide them with individuality
there is an intentional attempt to deny
them the subjectivity of individual experience;
Ranjit, his doting widowed mother, his elder
sister, his fiancée and friends,
their behaviour, their aspirations and reactions
remain extremely mundane, almost bordering
on cliché. With his strong attachment
to his mother, his willing acceptance of
a cushy job through the backdoor and dreams
of a prosperous life with his artist fiancé
Bulbul, Ranjit the protagonist is portrayed
as the archetype of the middle class youth
of the period who opts for security and
prosperity at the cost of moral, ethical
principles. Instead of creating empathy
with the characters the film makes an effort
to examine the cultural and social factors
that determine their responses to external
and internal stimuli. A shot of Bulbul enraptured
in a reverie of conjugal bliss is juxtaposed
with the merry smile of Supriya
Devi staring out of a hoarding of the
smash-hit Duti Mon stands as an
admission of the role of popular cinema
in perpetuating myths of petty happiness.
The disruption of emotional continuity
and mimetic depiction of the world in Interview
is heavily influenced by the techniques
of alienation developed by Bertolt Brecht
and applied to cinema most notably by Jean
Luc Godard. Ironically, the first major
instance of alienation is also the most
witty and engaging moment of the film. When
Ranjit boards a tram and begins his search
for the suit (and consequently the beginning
of high drama), the film captures a young
girl and a middle age passenger flipping
through a popular film magazine where a
production still of Interview showing
Ranjit Mullick travelling in the tram comes
just after a few photographs of Uttam
Kumar with his heroines! The bemused
girl attempts to make sure that the person
she is seeing in the tram is the same film-star
whose photograph appears in the magazine
is utilized by the director to create a
major breach in the drama by compelling
the actor to step out of his role in the
narrative and start a direct dialogue with
the audience. Breaking all the illusions,
Ranjit confesses that he is no film star
but just an average fellow who has allowed
Mrinal Sen - "the guy who makes
movies" to chronicle his adventures
and thus make a film which as he jeeringly
expresses will "make money for
his business." By inter-cutting
Ranjit’s speech with shots of the
film’s camera-crew (KK
Mahajan with a hand-held camera), the
director opens up the debate between the
reality itself and the realistic depiction
of reality that is the cornerstone of cause
and effect narrative cinema. The argument
progresses further when Ranjit exhorts the
viewer to believe that what he has seen
in the film so far is all 'true' except
for the fact that his mother as shown in
the film is not his actual mother but an
actor who he admits is doing a "wonderful
job in portraying his genuine mother."
To illustrate the point the director immediately
inserts a clip of Satyajit
Ray’s Pather
Panchali (1955), the film in which the
actor who plays Ranjit’s mother (Karuna
Bannerjee) gave her most celebrated performance
as Sarbajaya. The middle-aged passenger’s
appreciation of the interview’s story
as a portrayal of the life of the common
man followed by shot of poster of a Hollywood
heroine defaced by protest posters of cine-workers’
association and newsreel shots of a public
demonstration by them (accompanied by the
revolutionary slogan of "Inqilab
Zindabad" on the soundtrack) signifies
the director’s belief that newer forms
of cinematic story-telling are needed to
voice the reality of times and the struggle
of common masses to survive. The next shot
of a hoarding of Sean Connery playing James
Bond with machine-gun fire on the audio
track acts as a pointer to his awareness
of the oppressive power of the cultural
products of colonialism/imperialism and
the struggle towards creating newer cinematic
idioms would be a bloody one indeed!
In the penultimate scene of Interview
– shot in a theatrical style –
the actor is once more made to step out
of his role and face a hostile interrogation
from the observers. This exposes his hypocritical
bravura of claiming to be happy and self-sufficient
with his petty job. But now, as the unseen
spectators remind him that he had made desperate
attempts to acquire the suit which will
ensure his lucrative job and his dreams
of happiness and prosperity that the new
job ensures, Ranjit is now left in a dark
abyss (the shots of Ranjit lit up by a harsh
spotlight amidst a completely dark background
act as the perfect metaphor) and compelled
to own up his pretences. This admission
also makes him understand the terrible fallacy
of the system which refuses to acknowledge
his talents and individuality but tries
to estimate his capacity through standards
which are steeped in colonial (and hence
exploitative) ethics. So in the final act
of the film, Ranjit’s action of throwing
a stone at and his subsequent denudation
of a mannequin displaying a western-style
suit is juxtaposed with an extremely fast
paced montage – shots of street demonstrations,
news-clippings and photographs of the Vietnam
War, Latin American and African revolutionaries
with sounds of war and rousing music –
strongly identifying his anger with the
battles against colonial structures that
were going on all over the world during
the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Interview is an intellectually
challenging and structurally adventurous
film – one which breaks down conventional
forms of narration and dares the viewer
to understand its logic of arranging visuals
and audio and thus arrive at its thematic
and ideological position. Sen's admission
that the film would “shock a section
of our audiences (to violate the) outrageously
conformist... mainstream of our cinema”
makes the film somewhat pedagogical. The
patience and erudition its multi-layered
structure demands from its viewers, leaves
it drained of all emotions and throws up
major bottlenecks in communicating with
the very masses whose story and struggle
the film claims to narrate. However, with
newer conflicts affecting India and the
world with the march of global capital (and
its inherent socio-cultural values) assuming
newer dimensions in this era of liberalisation,
much of Interview’s intellectual
thesis holds relevance. The film retains
its value as a documentation of the conflict-wrecked
late 1960’s and early ‘70s and
is also a prime example of the efforts made
in India by some directors to do away with
traditional modes of story-telling in cinema
and set up more daring, more subversive
compositions.
Interview received the Jury Award
at the Colombo International Film Festival
(1972) while Ranjit Mullick, in his debut
performance, was awarded the Best Actor
Prize at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival
(1973).
Monish K Das is an alumnus of the
Film and Television Institute of India (FTII),
Pune with specialization in Film Editing,
1992. He now lives and works as a documentary
filmmaker and social communication consultant
in Kolkata.
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