To talk about a film which finds itself in the annals of the greatest films ever made is not easy . More so for a novice like me with no formal training of a film critic or journalist. Yet the visual delight that CHARULATA brings to human eyes and the calmness to human sensitivity is no less than a soft morning breeze on a Hot Kolkata Summer otherwise laden with excessive humidity and perspiration. Charulata to human mind is all about its perceived softness which can be felt but not seen - through out the movie. RAY was at his best in Charulata - and the film when he was pressed to speak he commented, was his best movie with FEWEST flaws.
Ray speaks about the movie in SIGHT & SOUND in 1982 - " Early on in the film Charulata is shown picking out a volume from a bookshelf . As she walks away idly turning its pages , she is heard to sing softly. Only a Bengali will know that she has turned the name of the author - the most popular Bengali novelist of the period - into a musical motif. Later, her brother in law Amal makes a dramatic entrance during a storm reciting a well known line from the same author. There is no way that subtitles can convey this affinity of fact between the two characters so crucial to what happens later. Charulata has been much admired in the WEST... but this admiration has been based on aspects to which response has been possible; the other aspects being left out of the reckoning."
Charulata ( 1964) - is adapted from Tagore's 1901 novel Nastanirh ( The Broken Nest). It's widely believed that the story was inspired by Tagore's relation with his sister -in-law Kadambari Devi who committed suicide in 1884 for reasons that have never been fully explained. Kadambari like Charulata was beautiful, intelligent and a gifted writer, and towards the end of his life , Tagore admitted that the hundreds of haunting portraits of women that he painted in his later years were inspired by memories of her.
Charulata finds itself in list of fifty/hundred best films ever made. It has the most complete fusion of eastern and western sensibility in Cinema - which is exactly why difficulties arise. The film conceals almost as much from the Bengali who is unfamiliar with western civilisation , as it does, in other ways, from the westerner who does not know Bengal. To the London Times reviewer in 1965, ' this stratum of Indian Life', seemed oddly more English than England itself. But to the cultured Bengali it presents a quite different, quintessentially Bengali face. He could never find it slow; rather he requires three or four viewings to absorb it to the full. It is Ray's most allusive, fully realised film, the one which if pressed, he chose as his best.
For Example , consider the way in which Bankim Chandra Chattopaddhyay , ' the most popular Bengali novelist of the period' , is woven into the film. He is the bond that helps to draw the lonely and childless Charu , wife of a somewhat earnest newspaper owner and Editor , Bhupati, towards her nonchalant Brother In Law Amal . After dropping her embroidery at the beginning of the film to wander aimlessly through the house , Charu embroiders Bankim's name in the air by humming it while she is taking one of his novels from the bookshelf. Later as Amal arrives during a violent storm of a kind that Bengal experiences during month of Baisakh ( Mid April to Mid May ) , he shouts out , in a theatrical manner , a line from Bankim and asks his pleased sister in law : " Have you read Bankim's latest ?"
A little later Amal is seen debating with Bhupati on the relative value of literature and politics. With some disgust, Bhupati tells him that his friend and assistant on the newspaper lost three nights' sleep after reading one of Bankim's books, and comments that he finds absurd ; when one has real issues and people to address , why read novels ? Bhupati's view is as unacceptable to Amal as Amal's to him , but that does not mean that Amal and Charu at least are agreed ; though Amal admires Bankim , he feels that his own taste has moved beyond him, as he somewhat condescendingly informs Charu during a languid afternoon discussion in her bedroom. She is unmoved by this boasting just as she is unmoved by politics , for she has read the new writers admired by Amal and finds them spurious.
Like her husband, Charu thinks that Amal should get married , and it is when the three of them come to talk this over that Bankim is invoked again. When Bhupati tries to entice Amal with visions of a trip to England promised by his prospective father in law , Amal finally rejects his overture with some well-known words from the novel Anandamath , ' Bankim's latest,' - taken from ' Bande Mataram', a rousing patriotic song in the novel that later became the anthem of Bengal and the rallying - cry of Bengal nationalists ( as Ray showed later in The Home and The Home the World) .
The final reference to Bankim in the film occurs at another crucial psychological moment, when Charulata tries to persuade Amal to stay , ostensibly to help her husband run the newspaper. This is the alliterative conversation Ray refers to above , in the course of which Amal mentions Bankim as one of the compelling reasons why he must return to Bengal , if and when he goes to England.
What is the significance of all these references ? At the moment in modern Bengali in which Charulata is set, around 1880, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was at the height of his fame , a leading light of the Bengal Renaissance of the generation preceding Rabindranath Tagore. Born in 1838, he joined govt service in Bengal in 1858 and remained in it till his retirement in 1891. While serving as a magistrate and revenue official he persued a parallel career as a novelist, essayist and editor, and by 1880 had written 9 novels in Bengali; a further five were to follow before his death in 1894. He was known popularly as the " Scott of Bengal", and some of his novels were translated into English. ' In respect of love of the romantic variety , he was the pioneer ' in Bengal , says noted author Nirad C. Chaudhuri. 'His depictions of love rivalled the effervescence of the great romantic exponents of love in Europe. This seemed so strange to traditional Bengalis, and yet took such a strong hold on the young, that Chatterjee was accused of corrupting the youth of Bengal .'
The visual elegance and fluidity that Ray achieves in Charulata are immediately evident in the long, all-but-wordless sequence that follows the credits and shows us Charu, trapped in the stuffy, brocaded cage of her house, trying to amuse herself. (At this period, no respectable middle-class Bengali wife could venture out into the city alone.) Having called to the servant to take Bhupati his tea, she leafs through a book lying on the bed, discards it, selects another from the bookshelf—then, hearing noises outside in the street, finds her opera glasses and flits birdlike from window to window, watching the passersby. A street musician with his monkey, a chanting group of porters trotting with a palanquin, a portly Brahman with his black umbrella, signifier of his dignified status—all these come under her scrutiny. When Bhupati wanders past, barely a couple of feet away but too engrossed in a book to notice her, she turns her glasses on him as well—just another strange specimen from the intriguing, unattainable outside world.
Throughout this sequence, Ray’s camera unobtrusively follows Charu as she roams restlessly around the house, framing and reframing her in a series of spaces—doorways, corridors, pillared galleries—that emphasize both the Victorian-Bengali luxury of her surroundings and her confinement within them. Though subjective shots are largely reserved for Charu’s glimpses of street life, the tracking shots that mirror her progress along the gallery, or move in behind her shoulder as she glides from window to window, likewise give us the sense of sharing her comfortable but trammeled life. The only deviation from this pattern comes after she’s retrieved the opera glasses. A fast lateral track keeps the glasses in close-up as she holds them by her side and hurries back to the windows, the camera sharing her impulsive eagerness.
Under the credits, we’ve seen Charu embroidering a wreathed B on a handkerchief as a gift for her husband. When she presents it to him, Bhupati is delighted but asks, “When do you find the time, Charu?” Evidently, it’s never occurred to him that she might feel herself at a loose end. But now, becoming vaguely aware of Charu’s discontent and fearing she may be lonely, he invites her ne’er-do-well brother Umapada and his wife, Mandakini, to stay, offering Umapada employment as manager of the Sentinel’s finances. Manda, a featherheaded chatterbox, proves poor company for her sister-in-law. Then Bhupati’s young cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) unexpectedly arrives for a visit. Lively, enthusiastic, cultured, an aspiring writer, he establishes an immediate rapport with Charu that on both sides drifts insensibly toward love.
“Calm Without, Fire Within,” the title of Ray’s essay on the Japanese cinema, could apply equally well to Charulata (as the Bengali critic Chidananda Das Gupta has noted). The emotional turbulence that underlies the film is conveyed in hints and sidelong gestures, in a fleeting glance or a snatch of song, often betraying feelings only half recognized by the person experiencing them. In a key scene set in the sunlit garden (with more than a nod to Fragonard), Amal lies on his back on a mat, seeking inspiration, while Charu swings herself high above him, reveling in the ecstasy of her newfound intellectual and erotic stimulation. Ray, as the critic Robin Wood observed, “is one of the cinema’s great masters of interrelatedness.”
This garden scene, which runs some ten minutes, finds Ray at his most intimately lyrical. It’s the first time the action has escaped from the house, and the sense of freedom and release is infectious. From internal evidence, it’s clear that the scene involves more than one occasion (Charu promises Amal a personally designed notebook for his writings, she presents it to him, he declares that he’s filled it), but it’s cut together to give the impression of a single, continuous event, a seamless emotional crescendo. Two moments in particular attain a level of rapt intensity rarely equaled in Ray’s work, both underscored by music. The first is when Charu, having just exhorted Amal to write, swings back and forth, singing softly; Ray’s camera swings with her, holding her face in close-up, for nearly a minute. Then, when Amal finds inspiration, we get a montage of the Bengali writing filling his notebook, line superimposed upon line in a series of cross-fades, while sitar and shehnai gently hail his creativity.
In an article in Sight & Sound in 1982, Ray suggested that, to Western audiences, Charulata, with its triangle plot and Europeanized, Victorian ambience, might seem familiar territory, but that “beneath the veneer of familiarity, the film is chockablock with details to which [the Western viewer] has no access. Snatches of song, literary allusions, domestic details, an entire scene where Charu and her beloved Amal talk in alliterations . . . all give the film a density missed by the Western viewer in his preoccupation with plot, character, the moral and philosophical aspects of the story, and the apparent meaning of the images.”
Among the details that might elude the average Western viewer are the recurrent allusions to the nineteenth-century novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–94). A key figure of Bengali literature in the generation before Tagore, Bankim Chandra (sometimes referred to as “the Scott of Bengal”) wrote a series of romantic, nationalistic novels and actively fostered the young Tagore’s career. In the opening sequence, it’s one of Bankim Chandra’s novels that Charu takes down from the bookshelf, while singing his name to herself; and when, not long afterward, Amal makes his dramatic first entry, arriving damp-haired and windblown on the wings of a summer storm, he’s declaiming a well-known line of the writer’s. The coincidence points up the affinity between them; by contrast, when Bhupati recalls incredulously that a friend couldn’t sleep for three nights after reading a Bankim Chandra novel (“I told him, ‘You must be crazy!’”), it emphasizes the empathetic gulf between him and his wife.
Music, too, is used to express underlying sympathies: Both Charu and Amal are given to breaking spontaneously into song, and two of Tagore’s compositions act as leitmotifs. We hear the tune of one of them, “Mama cite” (“Who dances in my heart?”), played over the opening images, and Amal sings another, “Phule phule” (“Every bud and every blossom sways and nods in the gentle breeze”), that Charu later takes up in the garden scene as they grow ever closer emotionally. (Manda, who has observed the pair together in the garden, afterward slyly sings a line of this song to Amal.) Ray weaves variations on both songs into his score. Another that Amal sings for Charu was composed by Tagore’s older brother Jyotirindranath, the husband of Kadambari Devi.
The film’s underlying theme of pent-up emotions trembling on the verge of expression is counterpointed both on a political level—Bhupati and his friends see in the Liberal victory at Westminster in April 1880 the chance of greater self-determination for India—and in the situation of Charulata herself, a gifted, sensitive woman yearning toward emancipation but slipping unconsciously toward a betrayal of her husband. To Western eyes, all three members of the triangle might seem willfully obtuse or impossibly naive. This again would be a misapprehension born of unfamiliarity with Bengali society, where, as Ray pointed out, a husband’s younger brother—in this case, a close cousin, which is much the same in Bengali custom and terms—is traditionally entitled to a privileged relationship with his sister-in-law. This relationship, playfully flirtatious, “sweet but chaste,” between a wife and her debar, is accepted and even encouraged. Charu and Amal simply stray, half unknowingly, across an ill-defined social border.
Ray was always known as a skilled and sympathetic director of actors. Saeed Jaffrey, who starred in The Chess Players (1977), bracketed him and John Huston as “gardener directors, who have selected the flowers, know exactly how much light and sun and water the flowers need, and then let them grow.” Soumitra Chatterjee, who made his screen debut when Ray cast him in the title role of the third film of The Apu Trilogy, The World of Apu (1959), gives perhaps the finest of his fourteen performances in Ray’s films as Amal—young, impulsive, a touch ridiculous in his irrepressible showing off, bursting with the joy of exploring life in its fullness after his release from the drab confines of a student hostel. He’s superbly matched by the graceful Madhabi Mukherjee as Charu, her expressive features alive with the ever-changing play of unaccustomed emotions that she scarcely knows how to identify, let alone deal with. She had starred in Ray’s previous film, The Big City (1963); he described her as “a wonderfully sensitive actress who made my work very easy for me.”
In order to mould Tagore's story into a film, Ray had to solve some knotty problems. First, there was the right balance to be struck between Western and Bengali elements. ' Nastanirh is a story which may not be deeply rooted in Bengali tradition,' Ray explained to Andrew Robinson in INNER EYE. ' It has a western quality to it and the film obviously shares that quality. That's why I can speak of Mozart in connection with Charulata quite validly , I think. But the whole idea of DEVAR and wife's relationship is very Bengali, deeply rooted in convention. But what happens , the denouement, is more western than Indian , I think.' There's a strong western element in the telling of the story.'
Secondly, Ray had to settle on an exact period for the story. Tagore is vague about this but various clues, not least its probable autobiographical origin , led Ray to the very early 1880's rather than to 1901 , the publication date ( and the period preferred by the translators of the English Edition). He fixes it at 1879-80 in the film by the date on Bhupati's newspaper and by various references to the British Election in which Galdstone was returned to power. Other references , to the war in Afghanistan , to the Press Act and to the various taxes , reinforce this. Ray enjoyed the background research in the National Library In Kolkata and elsewhere and felt that the film gained considerably from the additional details such as Disraeli's nickname ( which Bhupati relishes using on Amal, to his utter confusion ).
Thirdly , there were psychological weaknesses in the story, with which Ray had to wrestle. He explained his solutions at length in a remarkable article in Bengali written in reply to a critic who had queried , ' What is the difficulty in incorporating in the script the story from beginning to end without any change ? ' ' I dont think an article like that has been written by any other director ever,' said Ray. There were two principal faults in Tagore's story he identified : the lack of build-up to the treachery of Bhupati's manager Umapada , Charu's brother, who embezzles a large sum of money from the newspaper , and the prolonged incomprehension on the part of Bhupati of his wife's love for Amal. Ray's solutions are elegant , economical and subtle, depending on a much fuller rounding-out of the character of Umapada than Tagore allowed, an intensification of Charu's loneliness, and the portrayal of Bhupati as a somewhat more sensitive figure. The story is also compressed in time, into a span of two months - something that Ray more and more liked to do with his screenplays. And where Tagore's story makes reference to early years of Bhupati's newspaper and marriage to Charu, in Charulata all that is implied in words and actions, rather than spelt out in actual scenes.
Ray rarely used locations for interiors, preferring whenever possible to create them in the studio, though so subtly are the sets constructed and lit that we’re rarely aware of the artifice. Charulata includes few exterior scenes; almost all the action takes place in the lavishly furnished setting of Bhupati’s house. As always, Ray worked closely with his regular art director, Bansi Chandragupta, providing him with an exact layout of the rooms and detailed sketches of the main setups, and accompanying him on trips to the bazaars to find suitable furniture, decorations, and props. The result feels convincingly authentic, evoking a strong sense of period and of a class that ordered their lives, as critic Penelope Houston has put it, by “a conscious compromise between Eastern grace and Western decorum.”
Though he readily acknowledged the contributions of his collaborators, Ray came as close as any director within mainstream cinema to being a complete auteur. Besides scripting, storyboarding, casting, and directing his films, he composed the scores (from Three Daughters on) and even designed the credit titles and publicity posters. Starting with Charulata, he took control of yet another filmmaking function by operating his own camera. “I realized,” he explained, “that working with new actors, they are more confident if they don’t see me; they are less tense. I remain behind the camera. And I see better and get the exact frame.”
Charulata was the best received of all Ray’s films to date, both in Bengal and abroad. In Bengal, it was generally agreed that he had done full justice to the revered Tagore—even if some people still harbored reservations about the implicitly adulterous subject matter. After seeing the film at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear for best director, Richard Roud noted that it was “distinguished by a degree of technical invention that one hasn’t encountered before in Ray’s films,” but that “all the same, it is not for his technique that one admires Ray so much: no enumeration of gems of mise-en-scène would convey the richness of characterization and that breathless grace and radiance he manages to draw from his actors.”
From its lyrical high point in the garden scene, the mood of Charulata gradually if imperceptibly darkens, moving toward emotional conflict and, eventually, desolation—a process reflected in the restriction of camera movement and in the lighting, which grows more shadowy and somber as Bhupati sees his trust betrayed and Charu realizes what she’s lost. Inspired, as he readily admitted, by the final shot of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Ray ends the film on a freeze-frame—or rather, a series of freeze-frames. Two hands, Charu’s and Bhupati’s, reaching tentatively out to each other, close but not yet joined. Ray’s tanpura score rises in a plangent crescendo. On the screen appears the title of Tagore’s story: “The Broken Nest.” Irretrievably broken? Ray, subtle and unprescriptive as ever, leaves that for us to decide.
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