'''Ek Din Pratidin'''


aka And Quiet Flows the Dawn aka And Quiet Rolls the Day 1979 96’ col Bengali d/p/sc Mrinal Sen pc Mrinal Sen Prod.
st Amalendu Chakravarty’s Abiroto Chene Mukh c K.K. Mahajan m B.V. Karanth lp Satya Bannerjee, Geeta Sen, Mamata Shankar, Sreela Majumdar, Umanath Bhattacharya, Arun Mukherjee, Tapan Das, Nalini Bannerjee, Kaushik Sen, Tupur Ghosh, Gautam Chakraborty, Biplab Chatterjee


Sen uses a thriller format for this tale set among Calcutta’s petty bourgeoisie. A young woman, Chinu (Shankar), is the sole breadwinner supporting a family of seven headed by a retired clerk (S. Bannerjee) and his wife(G. Sen). One night, she does not return home from the office and, as the hours pass, the family grows increasingly distraught as each member, including the independent-seeming university student Minu (Majumdar), begins to realise how dependent they are on Chinu’s labour. Filmed by Sen with a mastery of mise en scene in cramped surroundings, the story graphically illustrates how profound insecurities underpin a precarious, egotistical moral code that refuses to acknowledge the real place of women in the social network. When Chinu returns by taxi in the morning, nobody dares question her since this would involve each family member having to betray the selfishness of their concern. With amazing resilience, the facade is restored. There are some echoes of Sen’s previous stylistic devices (e.g. direct address to camera by the characters when they visit a hospital to check on missing persons), but the film leaves an indelible impression of the cavernous courtyard surrounded by claustrophobic apartments and, beyond the gate, a teeming and indifferent metropolis making its presence felt mainly on the soundtrack. Sen claimed that the film started his interest in the ‘inward’ investigation into middle-class life, away from the explicitly political language of his earlier 70s films.

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