Sansar Simantey (1975)

Endearingly realist love story between a prostitute and a thief. Rajani (Roy), a streetwalker, shelters the thief Aghor (So. Chatterjee) but he steals her money. She has him beaten up by a mob and then nurses him back to health. Aghor gives her a stolen necklace and is then chased by his own gang for failing to share the booty. Eventually Rajani agrees to marry Aghor and he promises to buy her from her pimp, but he gets caught by the police. Major scenes include Aghor taking Rajani on a tour of Calcutta, the hand-held shot showing the police searching the corpse of Rajani’s friend Manada, and cameraman Reza’s controlled bounce-lighting technique. The love story does not, except at the end, interfere with the film’s intention of showing sentimentalised life in the red-light area through a series of characters like the madam, the doctor, the vendors, the hoodlums, the landlord’s agent who comes for his weekly rent, and the ‘respectable’ neighbours.