The Big City, review - Telegraph Dir: Satyajit Ray Stars: Madhabi Mukherjee, Anil Chatterjee, Jaya Bhaduri The BFI's complete two-month retrospective of Satyajit Ray's work is cause for celebration, but where to start? This is as good a place as any. The film which won Berlin's Best Director prize for Ray in 1964 is a bustling urban drama about the conflicts of work, gender and money, richly believable in the details and fascinating in its social vision. Madhabi Mukherjee, perhaps the director's greatest female star - she would take the title role in his next film, Charulata (1964) - plays Arati, a young mother in mid-Fifties Calcutta whose husband Subrata (the excellent Anil Chatterjee) is struggling to support their household on his bank clerk's salary. Both his parents, his teenage sister and their four-year-old son are all dependants, which leads Subrata to cave in and suggest that Arati should take a job. She becomes a door-to-door salesgirl for a knitting-machine company, and rather excels at it, but her dogmatic father-in-law (Haren Chatterjee) considers this a shaming development and stops speaking to his son. Though Ray's leading lady steals the film with a magnetic performance combining anxiety with a sneaking pride, the director's gift is to see this situation from every angle: her son has to be bribed with new toys on an almost daily basis to accept his mother's absence, while her sister-in-law takes real pleasure in watching Arati become a kind of professional role-model. By the mid-Sixties, resistance to women working in Bengali society had significantly lessened, so this is casting a backwards, Mad Men-esque glance, albeit more subtly, on the status quo ante. Just when you think it's heading for a regulation melodramatic ending, it springs a gloriously philosophical one instead.