Ray: Charulata (1964)

In many ways, Satyajit Ray was the most European of Bengali directors, in the same way that his champion, Kurosawa, was the most European of Japanese directors. There’s something appropriate, then, in seeing him adapt a novella by Rabindranath Tagore, whose writings culminated the Bengali Renaissance, the gradual importation and internalisation of European and British culture over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Working from Tagore’s The Broken Nest, Ray paints a portrait of Charulata (Madhabhi Mukherjee), a lonely housewife living in Victorian Calcultta, caught between her dedication to her husband, Bhupati (Shalen Mukherjee), a printer, and her husband’s cousin, Amal (Soumittra Chatterjee), a calligrapher. Ray himself was both a notable typographer and a notable calligrapher, and in fact pioneered a variety of styles that drew from both Western fonts and Bengali flourishes, perhaps explaining why Charulata feels so collapsed into the writing she starts to embark upon under both Bhupati and Amal’s guidance. Specifically, Ray’s lettering styles drew on both Western and Bengali musical notation, meaning that his trademark scenes of music performed and appreciated feel more collapsed into the screenplay than ever before, just as his dialogue and even his cinematography feels peculiarly musical, continuous with his score; it is as if his camera managed to distill indolence into a melody, swooping and panning around Charulata as she wanders and ponders, elegant even in her restlessness and frustration. That makes for a powerful, understated character study, but it  also allows Ray to synaesthetically evoke the entire culture-world that surrounds her, especially the way it recapitulates and condenses the progression of European and English letters over the last two centuries – Bhupati yearns to be an orator, essayist or parliamentarian in the tradition of Addison, Steele, Burke and Macaulay, Amal composes Romantic poetry, and Charulata is somehow in between, embodying the rise of female literacy that made it all possible, the only true novelist and novel reader in the film. In that sense, it’s a tribute to Tagore as a realist novelist, and to the realist Indian novel generally - realism reimagined through neorealism, best watched through binoculars, too intimate and immediate to be experienced up close.