On demand: "The Adversary/Pratidwandi"

1970's The Adversary is Satyajit Ray, post-1968, pulling his cinema into a new decade and a new shape, with the help of a Sunil Ganguly novel. Gone, for the most part, are the mythopoetic images of rural life, replaced by something harder and more direct: handheld dispatches from the sprawling, crowded, neon-lit city that suggest this filmmaker had been spending his time at international festivals checking out the latest Godard or New Hollywood offerings. Narratively, it chimes with the same year's Five Easy Pieces, centring as it does on an educated but unemployed and thereby ever more frustrated drifter looking askance at polite society, this time from the margins of Calcutta. Dhritiman Chatterjee's Siddhartha Chaudhary is a med-school dropout introduced blowing his latest job interview by bringing up his support for Vietnamese resistance fighters. He tries to take refuge from this unsparing world in a cinema, only for an unexplained explosion nearby to send him stumbling back out onto the streets; a brief spell in the shade is interrupted by the pie-eyed pieties of passing Western hippies; and when he ventures in the direction of a pal's film club to catch the latest Swedish import ("no cuts", the pal somewhat lasciviously promises), he's dismayed to have to sit through a dreary drama offering no nudity whatsoever. At which point, the overall picture becomes clear: this is Ray, then pushing fifty, making his own show of sympathy for a younger generation who - for one reason or another, and occasionally through their own making - can't get any satisfaction whatsoever.

The impoverished Apu, so attentively studied and nimbly described in the course of this director's earlier, breakthrough trilogy, had been scrabbling to get anywhere in this India; here, even the scions of the country's middle-classes are shown to be disenfranchised, leaving Siddhartha (whose princely name sounds more than vaguely ironic) with too much time on his hands and not nearly enough money in his pocket. So he flounders and fantasises in the established Billy Liar! style, and talks nonsense with his mates, as twentysomething men everywhere are prone to do; he hatches a crackpot (and ultimately doomed) plan to resolve an awkward situation involving his sister and her employer; and, upon being reminded of a Che Guevara biography in his possession, he himself makes timid efforts to bring about a revolution that - albeit in a roundabout and not entirely effective fashion - comes to pass before the closing freeze-frame. By this point, Ray had the confidence to allow a film to flow from one telling anecdote to the next, and if there's an obvious limitation here (Siddhartha isn't the kind of character to whom especially dramatic events occur), the advantage is that this protagonist covers a lot of ground in the course of his peregrinations. Gradually - scene by scene and scheme by scheme - The Adversary builds quite the detailed picture of what life must have been like for Calcutta's comfortable yet undermotivated kids at the turn of the Seventies. Along the way, Ray's steady naturalism is expanded via expressionist flourishes: inserts pointing up a sometime med student's anatomical worldview, negative images of moments imprinted on the protagonist's subconscious, the heightened ticking of a clock that in passing positions Siddhartha as a shuffling human timebomb. Given the breathless crosspollination going on in Seventies cinema, you have to wonder whether either Scorsese or Schrader saw it before starting out on Taxi Driver, but The Adversary also seems to predict an entire strain of indie cinema centred on outcasts, refuseniks and slackers who come to learn - in a roundabout fashion, adjacent to the hard way - that the best course of action they can take for their own peace of mind is, finally, to burn your bridges and get the hell out of Dodge.

The Adversary is now streaming via YouTube.