Described in the New Yorker as “A shining comedy...made by Satyajit Ray, whose quizzical humor has a way of coming up and hitting you from behind”; by Albert Johnson of the San Francisco Film Festival, where it showed in 1972, as “a vivid, rather angry work,” The Adversary is set in Calcutta in 1969-70, when student unrest was at its height. Siddhartha is forced to drop out of medical school and join the ranks of job-hunting graduates. “His efforts...to cope with his personal and family problems, and the entire kaleidoscope of Calcutta's tense atmosphere which cannot help but affect him - this is the source of Ray's drama.... We are taken into Siddhartha's consciousness and see the past and present constantly brought before us, noticing all that he notices....” --Albert Johnson.
“At his first (job) interview, we see (Siddhartha) thoughtfully arguing himself out of a job by explaining to the complacent executives that the Vietnam War is a more significant event than the moon landing, that human resistance is more important than technological advancement.... His final gesture of protest...leads inevitably to a renunciation of city ‘progress'.... His creator, however, will return to confront it, showing in the protagonist of Company Limited the man whom Siddhartha might have become had he only prevaricated about the moon landing.” --Jan Dawson, Monthly Film Bulletin