So this movie predates The Giving Tree by four years, and that’s the only reason I don’t think Shel Silverstein deserves a writing credit.

The movie is about a family in Bengal. Uprooted from their home during the Partition, this once comfortably middle-class family is struggling to get by. The dad is a scholar, and it’s clear that trauma has done a number on him, and he’s no longer super-functional. The mom is doing housework. The eldest son of the family wants to be a singer[1], so refuses to get a job. And that means it falls on the eldest daughter to help everyone out.

So… she does. At first this means giving money from her tutoring job to her brother and sister, but after her mom berates her, she eventually drops out of school (despite being a good student) to get a full-time job. She gives almost all of her money to her mom; and then her younger siblings wheedle the rest out of her. So far, so bad, but it gets worse. (I’ll break here for spoilers.)

Spoilers

Because, see, there’s a guy who wants to marry her. He’s another student, but he’s been offered an engineering job, so will be able to support her well (and she could go back to school even — although being who she is she suggests that if they got married she could support his scholarly career with her work); but she puts him off, because she can’t leave her family, she’s responsible for supporting them after all. Only, he’s frustrated by this, and when he goes to visit her and she’s not home, her little sister slyly (and quite deliberately) moves in, and boom, now her sister took her boyfriend. (And, with great chutzpah, asks her to sing a song at their wedding, to add one more imposition.) Meanwhile, her younger brother gets a job… but moves off to live in the company dorms, where he’ll “try to send money home, if I can.”

Eventually, after a series of further misfortunes, she’s living a life where she goes off to work every day, then comes home and sits in her room in the dark, totally golluming… and, not coincidentally, hiding that she has a worsening case of tuberculosis.

And here, finally, she gets a break of sorts: The older brother, the singing one, had gone off to get famous, and it worked. He’s now well-known and has money; when he comes back and discovers how far she’s fallen, he is finally able to, for the first time in this whole movie, give something back to her… by paying for a sanatorium, where she can go to recover from the tuberculosis. And the last time we see her is in a visit he makes there, where she is out of the immediate crisis, but still fragile and prone to relapse, and finally, tragically, desperately shouts at her brother “I want to live!” But, it is heavily implied, she won’t.

And so reading all that, it’s clear that this is a melodrama. Director Ritwik Ghatak was apparently a proponent of the form, and believed that it was unjustly put down. But it’s a melodrama tempered by neorealism, Douglas Sirk by way of Satyajit Ray. There are almost documentary shots of downtown Kolkata, and the lead performance is low-key and naturalistic for the most part, even as everything around her is heightened.

It’s clearly a well-made film. There are shots that are surprising, the use of sound is striking, and the way that it’s layering a family story on top of a sociopolitical one is interesting. But not gonna lie, it’s deeply frustrating to watch, because watching someone destroy their own life via acts of misguided selflessness is just painful to sit through. Glad I watched it, not something I’ll come back to, but I do understand why people put it on their lists.

Also, as a random side note, when googling for this movie, I discovered that there’s also a Bengali TV series of the same name from 2023, the description of which on a streamer is: “Abandoned by her father & coping with an alcoholic brother, Brinda becomes her family’s sole provider as a nurse. She finds happiness in her sacrifice to meet the needs of her brother & sisters. Watch Brinda stand tall in her selfless journey.” Obviously that’s not a straight adaptation of the movie, but also obviously it’s not not an adaptation in some way; and it is absolutely wild to read that after watching this movie, like a gaslighting description of the movie’s plot.

  1. He sings a lot in the movie. I’m not really familiar with the particular style of singing he’s doing, so I wasn’t sure at first if he was supposed to be bad/delusional or if he’s supposed to be actually talented; turns out the latter. ↩︎