NAGARIK 61 the eldest son^s girlfriend belongs is no better. The girl and her widowed mother earn their livelihood by sewing$the younger sister in this household turns to prostitution in order to escape from the ruthless pressure of their precarious existence. The first family takes in a paying guest, a qualified chemist who, as he can find no other job, takes up one with a company which manufactures spurious drugs. It is his surreptitious help which keeps the family going for a long time; but the last shreds of middle class vanity are torn apart and the decision to move out to the slum is taken when the father dies and the chemist loses his job. Reminder of the Theatre At first sight, the film contains many of the ingredients of the Bengali romantic film as it used to be 25 years ago, including the romantic interlude between the chemist and]the daughter of the house. Also, the dialogues, as well as the settings, which are mostly studio sets, appear to belong to the theatre rather than to the cinema. This becomes evident when one looks at the scenes set in the backyard of the house where Ramu has just moved in with his family. The dinginess and intimacy of the place is established at the very beginning by the camera moving meticulously over a series of well organized visual details, including the clothes hanging on wires along the yard, and the single coconut tree. With all these naturalistic details, however, what we have here is a limited, static set reminiscent of the theatre. Or take the mysterious violin player who plays a tantalizingly sweet tune as he passes along the street, but eludes Ramu whenever he tries to get him; or take Jatinbabu, Ramu's neighbour, who, with his eternal dreams of buying expensive foodstuffs and having a feast every day, represents to a middle "class Bengali audience, a familiar comic type found in the theatre. Yet the greatness of the film lies in that this limited naturalism is not its own end. It is the disciplined frugality of these details of setting and characterization which attract] our attention here. One even senses a certain impatience with the conventional naturalism of the Bengali film, circumscribed ^as it is by an ideological framework which is essentially romantic and for that reason acceptable to a Bengali middle class audience. On the one hand, we find Ritwik daringly carrying the convention of naturalism to its logical limit so that the presentation of poverty in it does not remain confined to a few cracks in the wall of the house; even the lines on the faces one encounters have poverty written on them. In this, Ritwik is a worthy compeer of the early Satyajit .Ray.