Interview (Mrinal Sen, 1971)

 

Mrinal Sen’s Interview is in part a genial, sad-sack comedy of errors. Ranjit Mallick (played by Ranjit Mallick) gets an interview via his connected uncle for a job that pays double his current salary; he's led to believe it’s in the bag as long as he presents effectively, including wearing a Western suit. Mallick owns such a suit, but it’s been at the dry cleaners for months (he was worried about the moths getting to it at home), and now can’t be retrieved because they’re on strike, triggering a frantic against-the-clock attempt to find a replacement, which he then loses while intervening to thwart a pickpocket on the bus. The insistence on Western formality is depicted here as an imposition or affectation which nevertheless has severe economic consequences, as such symbolizing the ongoing pernicious legacy of the country’s cultural past. Sen’s critique further entails a disruption of familiar forms and conventions, a project dormant for the first half hour or so but then stunningly asserting itself when a woman notices how Mallick resembles a photo in a magazine she’s reading and he suddenly addresses the camera to acknowledge that it is indeed him, exposing the project’s artifice; the narrative continues, but playing now to a more critically heightened audience, culminating in a complete suspension of the filmic space, Mallick set down in a disembodied space and addressed by an offscreen voice that identifies itself as that of the audience, the ultimate tone a mixture of anger and defiance and plaintiveness. Sen further fractures and extends his film’s boundaries with documentary surveys of regular Indian life, of protest around the world, of (heavily Westernized) advertising posters, with written messages attacking the impact of computerization (that last item, at least, can’t help but appear quaint). It’s a remarkable, fresh, constantly surprising work, and surely far too little known, at least in the ever-bulldozing West.