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Cinema
And
Quiet Rolls The Day
A
review of 'Ek Din Pratidin' by Mrinal Sen
 "Ek Din Pratidin" (And Quiet Rolls the Day) was a fine film directed by Mrinal Sen. The narrative underlined what happens when a working girl doesn't return home after work.
Sen is one of the first to assess the changing position of women with
Industrialization and Urbanization. Mamata Shankar, Gita Sen, Sreela Mazumdar & Satya Banerji comprised the cast.
Ek Din Pratidin is based on a story by a famed Bengali writer Amalendu Chakravorty. A family of seven members with father (Satya Banerji), mother (Gita Sen), three sisters and two brothers is solely dependent on the earning of a single member of the family, i.e. the eldest working girl Mamata Shankar. The film opens with a sequence of the younger son getting hurt while playing, and taken to the clinic for treatment. Another opening sequence shows a man urinating on the walls of the house where the family stays, and the house-owner castigating the person concerned for the act. Scenes of everyday life likely to be seen in Calcutta. Sen always has been giving us these images from Calcuttan life in films after films.
The story unfolds slowly when the working girl doesn't return home that night. At first, the family members kept silent hoping that she might have been working overtime, and will arrive late. The younger
sister (Sreela Mazumdar in a superb performance) goes out to phone to see if her sister is still at the office. She returns home without being able to contact her sister. Now the family members gets panicky, and the father goes out and watches the buses go by, without his daughter alighting from any of them. When the last bus also passes by, he gives up hope and returns home. Soon the inmates of that
multi-storied building where both the landowner and his several tenants reside together get wind of the fact that Mamata Shankar has not returned home that night.
The reactions from the various neighbors are depicted beautifully. Some makes acerbic comments, while others are very sympathetic. Sova Sen, in a cameo role as a
neighbor is good. There are some good characters too, who comes to help the family in their hour of crisis. Two such characters, one is Shyamalda who stays in the same premise, and the other is the scooter-owner friend of the brother, who goes out in search of the missing person.
The two youths first goes to the Police Station to lodge a complaint. Biplab Chaterji as a policeman, in a small role, excels. Biplab come to the family's residence for inquiry, and extracts some facts about Mamata's personal life and about the type of garments she was wearing that day. Sreela Mazumdar provided Biplab Chaterji and his assisting officer with the details about her sister.
Meanwhile, the brother and his friend goes to the morgue to find out whether his sister's body is there. In the meantime, the family comes to hear a news that some lady with similar characteristics & badly injured in an accident is lying in Nilratan Medical Hospital. The father, along with the good neighbour Shyamalda, goes to Nilratan Hospital to find out the truth.
A number of other people had also come to verify whether the injured lady is one of theirs' or not. The father discovers that the girl was not his daughter. They return home relieved.
But it was a harrowing time for the family during that night. In the morning hours, the small girl of the family sights her eldest
sister (Mamata Shankar) coming back. Surprisingly, everyone in the family eyed her with suspicion and didn't even ask her as to where she had been the previous night.
However, the landlord comes down and asks Mamata's father to vacate the house as soon as possible, saying that this locality is only for decent people.
The last sequence shows Gita Sen (who was keeping bad health the previous night) in the morning hours begin to prepare for her everyday household chores.
The critics may find faults. They may argue that in a big city where
neighbors live like virtual strangers, the fact that neighbors are shown discussing the non-returning of the girl to the household at such lengths is not the true picture of recent times when people are mostly not concerned about the lives of others. But maybe such minor blemishes apart, the novelty of the theme has never been explored in Indian Cinema. Sen's penchant to keep the audiences guessing as to where the girl disappeared is very much in evidence because he doesn't offer any solutions.
Film Critic John Wood finds an excellent example of the liberated woman in Mrinal Sen's
"Ek Din Pratidin". "The heroine is her own boss. There is no answer to the question why she did not return home at night. Sen says it is her business where she had been."
In an Interview, when Mrinal Sen was asked about his personal relationship with Satyajit Ray, Sen said that they never discussed each other's films in great details. Ray made some acerbic comments regarding this Mrinal Sen film saying that the maker of the film doesn't know where the women character had disappeared the previous night in the film. To this, Mrinal Sen said that definitely he could have offered a solution in the film as to where the girl disappeared, but that is not where the focus of the film lies. What he was trying to expose was the hollowness of our characters and parochial outlook whenever misfortune befalls upon us.
The film was released in 1979, and won awards at several International Film Festivals.
–
Subhajit Ghosh
August 3, 2000
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