Critics reviews

Ghatak manages to transform the external nature of lighting into the palette of inner expressionism, rejecting the documentary-style greys of Italian neorealist films for deep exaggeration befitting the melodramatic tone of the film. At other times, the externally removed and objective character of light is left alone to simply illuminate the mundane and the everyday.

Ghatak's film is a work of sensations. Breaking from the graceful realism of compatriot Satyajit Ray's concurrent miniatures of Indian society, the story is filtered through fevered montage, jump cuts, baroque frames (a multi-plane, deep-focus composition involving a riverbank and a locomotive puts Ghatak on the level of Kurosawa and Wajda), and, most striking, the frequently contrapunctual play of image and sound.

There are historical and political depths to this film, as in every Ghatak film; but it is these elements of intimate, family melodrama that I wish to stress in this brief tribute – not just as a matter of content, but above all as a matter of form, film language, style. For Ghatak is among cinema’s greatest and most radical stylists.

[The first shot of the film] is a landmark: it will serve the film's action, its story, and be taken up in its development; it will return several times, under varied forms, in scenes arranged in relation to each other. And yet this shot endures, is amplified, composed, as much inside itself as in relation to the following shot, with the result that an extreme tension is born, inducing emotion, an emotion rarely attained to this degree...