The Outsiders

Though Sen is often touted as the more corrosively political counterpart of his compatriot Satyajit Ray, the evidence of a film like this tends to suggest that he merely draws from a deeper well of despair. A study of 'marginals' - a low-caste father and son whose response to rural poverty is an extremist passivity, shading into idle parasitism - it manages a modicum of black humour from the old man's half-baked self-justifications, but slides inexorably towards tragedy and into a deadlock position of presenting defeatism as revolt. The anger's real enough, but its direction is uncertain, and sadly ineffectual.