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Punashcha

aka Over Again 1961 120’ b&w Bengali d/p/sc Mrinal Sen pc Mrinal Sen Prod. st Ashish Burman c Sailaja Chatterjee m Samaresh Roy lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Kanika Majumdar, Pahadi Sanyal, Kali Bannerjee, Shefali Bannerjee, N. Vishwanathan, Kunal Basu

After the harrowing exploration of a marriage broken by social-historical pressures on rural life in Baishey Shravan (1960), Sen returned to the same issue in an urban context. The problems arise as the established patriarchal relations in a family are disrupted when the wife has to leave the domestic space to join the workforce. The resulting impact of a changing economic system on both male and female subjective attitudes and anxieties forms the substance of the plot. Sen contents himself with simply though critically setting out the problems without offering a solution. In this respect, his film allows for a level of ambiguity usually denied (in favour of an unambiguous validation of ‘traditional values’) in most Indian films with similar themes.

Film