Charulata

Satyajit Ray is so good at staging his scenes from inside the minds of his characters, and I think it is why he was so successful at crossing over to foreign audiences - his empathy for the people behind his characters. He always reached to get beyond the simple exchange of dialog - watching a Ray film is watching him carefully invade the mind of his creations. Their flaws, their desires, their loves all seem so universal coming from his camera.

The photography is one of the greatest joys of Charulata, as in most of his films - the camera feels so free, so unbound to any set formula or rule of how to operate it, the joy of the operator (Ray himself) so apparent. It glides throughout all of his films, playing the eyes of some omniscient presence the characters are sometimes semi aware of. We are jolted when they look into the camera and sing, but because we have been already lulled into his world it feels completely natural that they would sing to us.

Charulata is slower, more obtuse than some of Ray's earlier films, and it feels longer. I was underwhelmed by the story, which I felt took too many left turns. But Charulata is a persistently fascinating film, particularly the almost out-of-body performance by Soumitra Chatterjee.

I remember reading through Satyajit Ray's list of things that people from outside India would fail to get in "Charulata" – of all his films (up to 1980, anyway) the one he thought was most "superficially" accessible to Westerners – and thinking to myself: "But I DID get all this... at least, more or less."

In Bengal society (Ray writes) a woman's brother-in-law holds a privileged position; the two are EXPECTED to form a special friendship, and she is allowed to be more intimate with him than with anyone else to whom she's not related by blood (apart, of course, from her husband). Ray is right. Most Westerners don't know this. I certainly didn't. But we're able to infer as much of it as matters from the film itself: we can tell that Amal and Charulata expect, before they fall properly in love, a fair degree of freedom in negotiating their friendship; that this is okay by Bhupati; that this isn't considered odd by any of the participants; that it (probably) WOULD be considered odd were Amal an outsider... and we can tell a good deal more besides; this is, as everyone acknowledges, a film of exceedingly rich characterisations. What we CAN'T tell from the film alone is the extent to which the expectations and roles of the three central characters are duplicated in other marriages across India. But this doesn't matter. This is a chamber drama, not an allegory.

Ray also lists some literary allusions which Westerners are almost certain to be blind to, but again, I think he's underestimated the extent to which he gets across, in the film alone, all he needs to get across. We can tell, from the way the characters react, what the allusions mean; just as an allusion to Achilles' heel, if properly used, will make sense to (and add depth for) an audience entirely unfamiliar with Greek legend. Even the film's makes sense to outsiders in a way Ray thinks it won't. It's a Scottish tune (I know this because I recognised it, but you can tell it's Scottish even if you don't) with Bengali lyrics; we can tell it's a Western song, from (more or less) the land which currently rules over India, which at least some Indians have adopted as their own, which is popular enough for Amal to expect others to be familiar with it, etc. (I have to admit, though, that something was being conveyed by the lyrics that wasn't being adequately conveyed by the subtitles.)

It's a tribute to Ray's skill that even he doesn't realise just how much context he's managed to import into "Charulata". Of course, he's right in that nobody will get everything; Ray himself admits to not understanding the meaning of his own (hopeful? cautious? distancing?) final freeze frame ("I only knew that it was the right way to end the film"), and, I need hardly add, I don't either.

Ray was wrong to think that the allusions fall flat on Western ears or that some of the necessary social context is impenetrable, but the film would still have something to offer even if he weren't: the characters would still be as alive and real, the respect with which they're treated would be just as apparent; the film would still, in short, be a beautiful one.

Charulata displays a subtle story about the contradictions facing a cultivated and intelligent - yet idle - woman in a male-dominated society. Charulata's husband is a very rich man, a liberal intellectual and the editor of a journal "The Sentinel", dedicated to the "propagation of the truth". Unfortunately, the husband, though an honest man and an idealist, fails to give enough attention to his wife Charulata. The latter is interested in romantic Bengali literature, not politics. Her intellectual perspective thus clashes with that of her husband, who looks down on literature, and in particular on that literature which relates to love.

Through a unique understated sentimental experience, which forms the core of the movie, Charulata reveals to herself and her husband a power to act on the world. After a series of difficulties that affect her husband's newspaper and her own sentimental self, Charulata finally takes a step forward and proposes to collaborate with her husband. However, the director makes us doubt that love and work can be reconciled by referring to the title of the Tagore literary work the movie is adapted from, the "broken nest".

Contrary to what my comments above may suggest, this is NOT a movie with a heavy and obvious political message. The cinematographic style is thus often reminiscent of Jean Renoir's "Une Partie de Campagne", with, in particular, the use of a swing. The movie has little dialogue and uses the subtlety of symbols and the actors' facial expressions to convey what the characters go through. The characters are the center of the story as individuals, not archetypes, but it is because they are so credible and complex as individuals that they can make us think about universal questions.

As cinema appears to become ever more loud and brash, a work as delicate, subtle and understated as this may easily pass unnoticed, or mistaken as insipid. That is a great shame, since this is obviously a great masterpiece. Set in India in the last century, Charulata is trapped in a dull, stifling marriage. What starts off as innocent flirting with her brother-in-law soon sets off emotions that none of them, decent though they all are, can really control. There is no adultery as such - the betrayal is all in the mind - but the trust implicit in marriage is broken, and the future can only be faced with uncertainty.

This is a film of great grace and elegance, and also of considerable wit. But underneath the surface charm is a great seriousness. As always, Ray depicts the development of the characters with great insight and sensitivity, and coaxes fine performances from his cast. Western critics, in discussing this film, often draw parallels with the works of Chekhov or of Henry James, but Ray's inspiration was actually the great Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, on whose short novel this film was based. As a piece of film-making, it is absolute perfection - a real gem.

Much as I love this film, I wish that any new viewer might first encounter it on a big screen, with its lovely, rhapsodic recreation of its late 19th Century setting is most apparent. The Chekhov parallels are overwhelming-- same period, same bittersweet attention to over-privileged lives, more than anything else the same rare affinity for female characters.