The latest version of this page moved to indiancine.ma - Click here
Seemabaddha
aka Company Limited 1971 110’ b&w Bengali d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p Jung Bahadur Rana pc Chitranjali st Shankar’s novel c Soumendu Roy lp Barun Chanda, Sharmila Tagore, Paromita Choudhury, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Haradhan Bannerjee, Indira Roy, Promod
Ray’s follow-up to Pratidwandi (1970) sees contemporary Calcutta through the eyes of a dull sales manager in a fan factory. Shyamalendu Chatterjee (Chanda), whose life story is briefly narrated in a voice-over in the beginning, leads a well-off life among Calcutta’s newly rich, apparently untouched by the political turmoil around him. He gets involved in a deal with his corrupt personnel manager, to the disappointment of his sexy sister-in-law (Tagore), but the company rewards him with a promotion. The film’s moral points about the corrosive effects of a social system based on greed are made mainly through a series of markedly symbolic shots, such as the zoom into the telephone wire through which the corrupt deal is being hatched and, at the end, the high-angle shot from above the ceiling fan. The final film in Ray’s Calcutta trilogy would be Jana Aranya (1975).