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Mrinal Sen has a sharp perception of the bitter realities experienced by the lower middle class, presumably born of personal experience. This one is pretty despairing.

We have a large family comprising three generations living in a tenement comprising a room or two. Many other family's are crowded into this congested bee-hive of a building, with people all but peering into each other's quarters and lives. There is a single tap which serves all tenants. Neighbors can be civil, helpful, interfering or judgmental. As the title implies, life is a continuous, repetitive and bitter struggle to make ends meet and to retain dignity and decencies in a rigid and unforgiving society. His Kharij is set in a similar if not the same group housing building.

Chinu (Mamata Shankar), the eldest of four siblings, is the sole earning member in the family. One day she fails to return home. What could have happened-was she held up at work, or involved in an accident, or, hard to imagine, is she seeing someone? The alarm mounts as the day deepens into night and soon the whole neighborhood are observers and participants, each with their own theories and surmises, mostly derogatory. Why do they have to send a daughter for work and depend on her earnings? Police are not helpful and there is a tense sequence where the younger brother visits the morgue to identify the dead bodies found by the authorities. Finally the family bonds explode in mutual recrimination and accusations.

This is certainly depressing material, perhaps unnecessarily so, but it should hit us in a vulnerable spot. If Ray soars in hope and optimism even as he portrays extremities of suffering, Sen's world is an insider's dreary and claustrophobic vision. He sees no glamor in the curse of poverty.

Mercifully, India has been changing dramatically since the film was made.

A pre-teen ager servant boy dies of carbon monoxide poisoning on a cold winter night. He was employed by a young working Calcutta couple (Anjan and Mamata) with a small boy of their own. Taking money from a neighbor's friendly daughter, he slipped away to watch a movie on a cold winter night. Finding his usual sleeping corner below the stairs too cold, he bolts himself inside the kitchen, where a fire was burning. The next morning we witness a powerful discovery scene like on the morning after Macbeth's murder. The door is forced open and we see the commotion in the apartment block which is the stage of the drama.

Who is responsible? The landlord who failed to provide ventilation in the kitchen ("it's not a bedroom"), the couple for employing what is legally child labor and failing to provide reasonably comfortable sleeping arrangements? The police takes over and a post mortem is performed. Meanwhile a procession of the boy's relatives arrives and the father is inconsolable but lifts no accusing finger, his head bowed in acceptance of the nature of things. The film ends on a heart rending note of under-stated sadness.

Comparison with the titanic Ray is inevitable. Sen is also gentle but has a more steely and masculine quality. Ray has a child's sense of wonder, but Sen's tragic vision is touched with youthful anger. He has been called Marxist in outlook but the present film does not point an accusing finger at anyone, but does dramatically bring out a class divide almost as of two different species. The deceased boy's father Hari seats himself deferentially on the ground. He has no capacity for anger. He wails like a lost calf, while remaining meek and respectful to the end.

This is Ray's second last film made when he was just short of seventy. The tree is Ananda Mazumdar, a retired industrialist famed for his honesty and philanthropy, to the extent of having his town named after him. The branches are the four sons and two spouses. Mazumdar suffers a heart attack and as he hovers in the danger zone, the progeny converges around him. Ray is a good spinner of yarns and he knows how to play the heartstrings. Here he gives us a taut drama about old age and family relations with the background of Bengali society of the eighties (there is a family picnic and one of the cars is a Maruti 800).

Unlike some of his more acclaimed films which are about youth and childhood, this one is about aging with which comes cynicism and tolerance. He is able to turn an eye more understanding than indignant towards the corruption and rot in society. This somewhat lame anger is voiced through the youngest of the four sons, who chooses to opt out from the bribe driven business world. Ray was often accused of not being sufficiently concerned about the ills of society. He is after all no activist or reformer: he is a mere genius, an artist and a truthful mirror of the society to which he belongs.

Ray's women are more the expression of his ideals of humanity. The men are more often pathetic shadows, as in this one. Lily Chakravati as one of the wives gives a bold and charismatic portrayal of a woman disappointed in her marriage, with a mind and strength of self acceptance beyond her era and milieu.

This is a more complex film which expands the canvas to depict an era and a society. It achieves a high level of dramatic tension, even though it lacks the compassion and innocence of some earlier movies. It definitely limps at many places, as Ray is affecting a piety not his own. It is not his nature to judge people, as if to say, that might have been me. On the whole, a gripping film for all it's negligible weaknesses, easy and enjoyable to watch.