Courage wins. Review on Mahanagar Movie

The most notable aspect of this movie is the powerful performance by its heroine. The story is about a lower middle-class family striving to make ends meet in a big city. The husband is working as an accountant in a private bank which suddenly goes bust. Fortunately, the wife gets a sales-girl job at a company selling knitting machines to housewives. Suddenly she emerges from being a housewife to a hard working salesgirl, going for door to door selling-campaigns. Her conservative father-in-law cannot digest her going for a job although mother-in-law has no problem about it! Husband starts doubting when her boss drops her back home once. Her son curses his mother because he cannot understand why suddenly he is left alone at home without her. Especially noteworthy scenes are how she puts on her lip-stick after leaving home for office every day and then rubs it off just before entering the home, husband smoking in the middle of the night with two shadows falling on the net depicting double-mindedness of him, father-in-law begging for petty money from his ex-students. In the climax, one of her colleagues is fired on false charges of misconduct and the protagonist challenges her boss to ask for forgiveness knowing that this may risk her own job and also that her husband is out of job as well! On the one hand, the boss is helping her husband finding another job and on the other hand he is facing this adamant employee. This is a powerful moral struggle conveyed brilliantly by the director. In the last scene, both husband and wife are out of jobs but emerge fearless and confident about life in general.