Chicago Movie Journal is a new biweekly column about movies and movie-related things around the city.
The Runaway, about the misadventures of an eight-year-old delinquent who flees his rural home to fend for himself in Kolkata, conveys a Marxist sympathy for the lower classes in depiction of some of the minor characters and slum life in general. In Interview, the most formally inventive film I’ve seen in some time, Sen plays with cinematic technique throughout; characters break the fourth wall, documentary realism gives way to expressionistic sequences, and real-world current events intrude on the narrative. That film tells the story of a lower-middle-class man on a desperate search for a Western-style suit he can wear to a job interview; his blinkered desire to climb the social ladder represents a failure to see beyond his own wants. The character has a revelation in the final sequence, however, and chooses to fight against the capitalist order. The scene, heavy with rhetoric, is probably the least interesting in the movie, yet it doesn’t detract from the overall impact.
