Focus on SATYAJIT RAY: Charulata (1964)

It's very useful when a director throws his own critical opinion behind one of his own films and proclaims it his favourite. So it goes with Satyajit Ray and Charulata (a.k.a. The Lonely Wife, a.k.a. The Broken Nest).

Do we, in Charulata, have access to the quintessential Ray film? A moment of pristinely personal artistic achievement? If we do, Ray's aspirations were simple but not by any means modest. Taking Charulata as the yardstick, Ray favours face over voice. He prefers undercurrents to melodrama. He is a lover of the symbolic and he weighs his relationships down with conceptual baggage. He is a realist when it comes to women and society but in that realist frame he lets them take the lead. And, most importantly, he is not afraid of banality; he revels in the mundane but only because he can hide there his cherished thematic grandeur.

Of course, it is easy to make such broad claims when I have a few of his most praised films already under my belt. I should admit here that I cheated a little on this one. I actually caught the beautiful restored print of Charulata earlier this year when it screened at ACMI. (It looks fantastic, by the way.) I sought out the film in anticipation of this Director Focus and my thoughts have been sitting in draft since then. It has taken me a good four months to get through the tail end of Pasolini and the six Ray films I scheduled before this, but I have now finally arrived.

Re-watching Charulata having settled into Ray's aesthetic is a different experience. Being prepared for the film's languid pace (it moves like a majestic snail, as Kenneth Tynan put it) meant I was more able to take in the film's nuance. The delicate balance Ray sets up between his three protagonists, the bored, house-bound Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee), her work-obsessed husband, Bhupati (Sailen Mukherjee), and his younger cousin, Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee), who comes to stay with them after graduating from university, forms an enthralling core to his film.

Between his protagonists, Ray sets up three respective conflicts, each directly impacting the others: Bhupati, man of politics, is diametrically opposed to Amal's artistic temperament; Amal's artistic temperament sets fire to Charu's soul, something the two fight desperately to keep a lid on; and finally, Bhupati and Charu renegotiate their life together in response to their shifting circumstances.

Central to all of this is the controlled performance of Mukherjee. As Charu she is defiant, creative, intelligent and deeply romantic, yet Mukherjee must keep this all under her sari. The love cannot show. The independence cannot show. The bursting creativity cannot show. At least not until Ray is ready for the climax. By the power of Mukherjee's performance, Charulata becomes an intensive character study and a exploration of the shifting power dynamics within upper class colonial India.

Charu is locked away in more ways than one. Physically, she is boarded up in her husband's expensive mansion, sentenced by her gender to embroider handkerchiefs and read romance novels. The rest of her day she spends staring out from her cage to the street life below her window. Emotionally, she is ignored, condescended into invisibility. Bhupati doesn't afford himself much time away from his writing concerns and his printing presses, and the minutes he does set aside for his wife are spent patting her on the head and patronising her love of novels. He does recognise the intensity of her boredom though, and so invites his young relative to stay.

Amal is an unsettling presence as soon as he bursts through the door. His spontaneous personality sets him at odds with Bhupati's reserved intellectualism. The pragmatic Bhupati, heavily invested in his political newspaper, The Sentinel, insists that poetry, plays and novels are insignificant when compared to the real world change his writing can effect. The freewheeling Amal lets his older cousin's dismissal slide off his back as he stares dreamily into the distance contemplating the light of a night without stars. Good-naturedly, the two men press their points of view but when Bhupati insists he use his passion to unloose Charu's writing, he finds that art can change the world just as forcefully.

Charulata has a far sparser, far more sophisticated feel than Ray's earlier works. He controls his narrative more precisely, pulling less from the social realist vein. He gives each interaction a conceptual purpose and by doing so can pull back on overt drama. Charu's love for Amal is not expressed in words, in part because of the social constraints of the period, but also because its fire is reflected in her artistic expression and her enjoyment of his creative output. What is not expressed through this mutual, sometimes combative, creation and appreciation is passed between them in longing glances, which become ever more sorrowful.

Stylistically, too, Ray feels freer. Having recreated his lavish set in a studio, Ray was able to experiment with more embellished camerawork and with more structured composition. His work on Charulata is more fluid. He uses lengthier tracking shots and he is not afraid to use his camera to express his characters' emotional turmoil. His camera often moves faster than objects of his gaze, further impressing the volatility of the conflict within the house.

Charulata is a finely tuned piece of cinema. It is no wonder that Ray wouldn't re-touch it even if he had the chance. He has packed a lot in there and he's purposefully hidden much of it. It's a film that has grown on me with just two viewings and I am sure it will open up even further after more.

Next up: The Hero...


This post contributes to Director Focus: Satyajit Ray.