by Allan Fish
(India 1964 117m) DVD2
Aka. The Lonely Wife
The Sentinel
p R.D.Bansai d/w Satyajit Ray novella “Nastanirh” by Rabindranath Tagore ph Subrata Mitra ed Dulai Dutta m Satyajit Ray art Bansi Chandragupta
Soumitra Chatterjee (Amal), Madhabi Mukherjee (Charulata), Sailen Mukherjee (Bhupati), Syamal Ghosal (Umapada), Gitali Roy (Mandakini), Bholanath Koyal (Braja), Suku Mukherjee (Krisikanta), Dilip Bose (Sasanka), Subrata Sen Sharma (Motilal),
It’s surprising how the simplest of objects can be used as a motif on camera, and one of the unheralded favourites has to be the good old child’s swing. After all, La Roue, The Scarlet Empress, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Ikiru and Une Partie de Campagne, to name but a few from my selection, all feature memorable sequences on that delight of our innocent years. The symbolism in the above films may vary from the erotically charged to the almost spiritual, but they remain ingrained in the memory. Yet if I was to choose the most cinematic use of a swing in movie history, it would have to be the astonishing sequence in Satyajit Ray’s sixties masterpiece where the eponymous Charulata sings to camera, and the camera becomes almost intoxicated with movement, with one particularly clever shot taken from the swing itself.
In 1879 Calcutta, Charulata (or Charu for short) is the bored wife of Bhupati, the well-to-do editor of an English language political newspaper. To relieve her boredom, her husband – who is somewhat older than her – asks his cousin Amal, who is about her age, to come to stay. Amal and Charu soon find that they have a great deal in common, in particular a passion for literature. Amal encourages Charu to take up writing, and she succeeds in getting a piece published in a magazine, though doesn’t tell her husband. However, things come to a head when her husband’s newspaper folds after a trusted friend swindles him and Amal realises that Charu and he are falling in love and that he must leave. But when he does so, Bhupati overhears Charu crying and correctly interprets her feelings for his cousin.
The swing here seems to be a motif for the changes in life, as early on Amal talks of how he sees life and death as just like light and dark, or as a series of ups and downs. Ray thus shows Charu first developing feelings for him whilst moving up and down, back and forth on the swing. She observes him through opera glasses, but there’s obvious warmth between them. This is in stark contrast between her using them to give the audience its first distant glimpse of her husband. It perfectly sums up the emotional void between them, and thus makes her finding, if not a lover then a soul mate, that much more affecting. Yet for all that, the most memorable use of the glasses has to be during the same swing sequence, when she briefly sees a father holding a baby up through a window, and she looks down disconsolately. The combination of the longing and the sense of emptiness is more than palpable, it’s almost unbearably moving.
To many people, Charulata even beats the Apu trilogy as Ray’s finest work, whilst to others it can be painfully slow. It’s all a matter of rhythm, which is quite appropriate for a film which endeavours to painstakingly capture the rhythms of life in late 19th century Bengal. Like many of his films of this period, it’s concerned with women in Indian society, and this film is perhaps his most potent example of such a piece, worthy of comparison with Mizoguchi or Ozu, but 100% Ray in its outlook. He’s helped immeasurably by not only Mitra’s gorgeous interior photography but by his own Shankar-like score and by three perfect central performances. Chatterjee’s comes as no surprise to those familiar with his other work for Ray, but Sailen Mukherjee is heartrending as the unfortunate husband, while Madhabi is an absolute joy as the sexually and intellectually unfulfilled Charu, a vision of Bengali womanhood. It was all perfectly summed up in the Virgin Guide as having “the quality of a miniature painting where minute details are revealed by a stroke of the finest brush and the unspoken is made visual by mere suggestion.”
Click on names for archives
Writers/Founders
An emotionally overwhelming film, that ranks high on my Top 25 list as well. There are times I even rate it above PATHER PANCHALI as Ray’s masterpiece.
One of the best films of Ray and nice writeup.
This may be slow, but it’s a shattering film. I haven’t voted on the poll yet, but this will be at or near the top of my list. Great review penned by Mr. Fish.
My colleague is perhaps the most gifted writer on the net when it comes to word economy. This remarkable review again showcases his incomparable and prolific talent which is peerless. His Psolini and ray reviews here back to back represent a critical epiphany.
Now we just have to get him to appreciate DRIVING MISS DAISY.
Thanks Ebrahim for the honor of visiting here and for the kind words. Thanks Frederick for the usual insight!
Sam, there’s nothing odd about that view. I think there are a more than a few Rays that could qualify in this sense. If someone put a gun to my head and forced me to choose a single film as the director’s masterpiece I would opt for Days and Nights in the Forest. But my Ray Hall of Fame contains this film in addition to Pather Panchali, Jalsaghar, Devi, possibly Charulata. Some films I am less sure about at times. Of the films people don’t see as often Nayak (the hero) is an extraordinary work. And in the later Calcutta trilogy there are two very strong works in Middleman and Pratidwandi (the first in the trilogy). But Days and Nights to my mind has Ray at his most radical in many ways. The other point to make about Ray is that he too is a woman’s director in many ways and one could really run down his list and use just about every film as an example to prop up this idea. Getting back to Charulata Allan’s piece here (which I’ve seen before) is a fine one and he does particularly well to comment on the swing sequence. Charulata is also probably Ray’s most lyrical film.
Incidentally this is one of Madhabi Mukerjee’s two great performances. The other one occurs in Ray’s Mahanagar (the Big city). Many prefer the latter. Ray’s favorite actress though was Sharmila Tagore whom he introduced in Apur Sansar and then worked with again in Devi, Nayak, Days and Nights in the Forest, Seemabaddha (second part of the calcutta trilogy). Sharmila Tagore later became a very successful actress in Bombay commercial cinema as well.
Thanks so much for gracing us with your peerless eloquence and definitive knowledge of the great Ray, Kaleem. Your passion and appreciation for the man’s work can really get one going. I am always enlightened by your commentary!
Thanks Sam. Would that my knowledge on Ray were ‘definitive’! I have been revisiting his entire oeuvre recently though. Chiriyakhana (the zoo) is another minor gem. In Bengal incidentally one of his biggest successes was Abhijaan which barring the fine camerwork I don’t like as much. His biggest box office success though was the delightful Goopy kyne Bagha, ostensibly a children’s film but really one for all ages. It’s in many ways like Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress. Great entertainment rather than anything really serious but you can’t find better entertainment than this.
Another to my mind really strong feature about Ray is his sense of ‘ending’. The closing moments are often if not always rather ambiguous.
Kanchenjhunga is another underrated Ray. An important feminist statement in many ways. The film was the director’s first in color though he kept making b&w after this till he was more or less forced to graduate to color. The film though has long been begging for a restoration and one is finally underway now!
Well Kaleem, let’s just say that there are few who has availed themselves of the joys of Ray as you have, and these other films you mention here have been seen by few. I would agree with you that DAYS AND NIGHTS and DEVI are masterworks, and I think I feel the same way about THE MUSIC ROOM and this film here, as well as the APU TRILOGY of course. But I am incomplete and need to see the films you make so appetizing here!
Thanks for all the excellent cinematic info here!
Well, thanks for the kind words all. Kaleem is right about Madhabi Mukherjee and her two great roles. I love Charulata, but I can agree that, though it didn’t make my top 50, Days and Nights in the Forest is Ray’s other seriously major film of the 1960s, though both The Big City and Nayak (you’re right about that one being underrated, tried to get Sam to watch it but it sat dormant on his viewing backlog like everything else).
Devi I enjoyed, and it got better on reacquaintance, but not quite enough for greatness. Two Daughters was OK< but I wish I could see the original cut, which would probably have been called Three Daughters.
Why do I have to brought into this discussion in a negative way, when everything I’ve said here is positive ? I have watched about 20 Ray films, and have cleared about 8 backlogs from you since we met. I have blogging, reviews to write, a full-time teaching job, continuous trips to movies to Braodway shows and operas and concerts, and five kids in the house, all of whom have baseballschedules to negotiate now. I do not have the luxury nor ability to sit before my plasma all the time. The fact that I do what I do under the circumstances is rather incredible. I did see THE BIG CITY and about 19 other Rays. How many could say that.
I managed to watch RED RIDING TRILOGY over the weekend. The reward is to get publicly embarrased again. At 54 years old I must say there is very little left that i have not seen at this point.
I will be watching the 3 hr Devi cut this month at Lincoln Ctr. I have it on an Indian DVD but the transfer is quite poor.
In a Western context Ray always gets good reviews but Jalsaghar, Days and Nights, Devi are particularly lionized. In addition to of course the Apu trilogy and possibly Charulata.
To my mind Ray simply moves from strength to strength from through about ’75 when he made Middleman. The films are either masterpieces or very strong efforts and only rarely less than this. Essential Ray for me one way or the other includes all of his work beginning with Pather Panchali all the way upto Middleman with the exception of the two short films Karupurush/Mahapurush and earlier Paras Pathar.
Again Nayak is a perfect film. The reason I wouldn’t put it up there with a Devi or a Jalsaghar is because the subject somehow doesn’t seem as capacious. It is one of the great films about cinema however. I might not have seen a better one in this kind of humanistic context.
One of the features about Ray that the West has also been slow to recognize is the ‘auteurist’ in this director. Pathar Panchali, the traditional representation of Ray, is in many ways a misleading one.
Again Kaleem, your astonishing insights are deeply-appreciated here. Your clarification there of NAYAK is well-noted.
I think Jalsaghar is definitely Ray’s best and a cut above Charulata. Also you didn’t mention that lovely song in C’lata! Would agree with the poster that up until the mid 70s most of Ray’s work was very strong. I liked Days and Nights but felt it had a touch of middle class musings on civilization/nature/tribals – and of course even Ray can’t cast Simi as a tribal and get away with it.
SD: I also consider Jalsaghar superior to Charulata. also agreed on that beautiful song in the latter.
Would disagree on Days and Nights though. We begin in the film at the site of as it were ‘bourgeois complacency’ and through the course of the film it is precisely this smugness that comes apart. The tribals remain completely ‘other’, mysterious, threatening, seductive but still ‘other’. The central male characters (and this is also a tale of gender because the women here are more ‘knowing’ than the men, perhaps ‘wiser’, this could certainly be said about the also mysterious Sharmila Tagore) are all very ‘changed’ by the end of the story. But they do not necessarily ‘learn’ more. Of course the whole notion of space and geography is critical for the film. The barren sites, the forest are all represented with a sense of ‘foreboding’. So I think that Ray deconstructs urban bourgeois civilization here, not really the tribals. Nor do I believe that the latter represent for Ray anything quite as simple as ‘nature’. On the Simi Garewal move, it’s a rather fascinating one. Ray could have taken anyone here but he chooses an actress who’s at exactly the opposite end of the spectrum from the character she’s representing in every way imaginable. Perhaps this should give us pause.
There is an extraordinary moment in Nayak, possibly one of the best I have ever seen in the medium, when Uttam Kumar and Sharmila Tagore are seated in the dining car right by the window, the train pulls over at a platform and the crowd instantly recognizing the superstar crowds around the window. Sharmila averts her gaze and turns away, she is unable to look at the hysterical crowd. She gets very uncomfortable. Meanwhile Uttam Kumar, the much more practiced at this, coolly ignores those gathered. Eventually they start tapping madly on the glass to attract his attention but he remains placid and does not really engage in eye contact with them. This is a true auteurist moment. A commentary on the essence of the cinematic. The screen that separates the star from the crowd. The way Ray frames this one can feel a kind of ‘pressure’ as a viewer, so intense is the attention of the spectators. We are in a sense in Sharmila Tagore’s position, a bit tense in that moment. But of course in another sense we are not with those tapping on the glass but really on the inside, or the other side of the screen where the star resides. We have been watching this film really from Uttam Kumar’s vantage point throughout. But in this moment suddenly the veil is shattered in a strange way. We feel uneasy because we are on Uttam Kumar’s side and yet we are ‘perforce’ also part of the audience. Of course one member of the audience is seated with the star at that point in the figure of Sharmila Tagore. So we are again inside as well. The semiotics of this entire moment are quite profound and not easy to unravel. For this scene alone I regret missing out on the film in the recent retrospective because I believe this scene must have been mesmerizing in the theater.
Sharmila Tagore, who seemed to be playing adult – or at least mature roles, from the age of 12. She was born in December 1946, Devi was shot in late 1959, when she was still 12…
frightening…
Beautifully written review of one of my most favorite films – one that I watch once almost every year. Thank you so much.
The camera speaks more eloquently than the dialogue. I’ve written that if you’re not a lover who has had conversations with your beloved just through eyes, then this film is not for you.
Yes, I rate it above Ray’s other work, not only because it personally appeals more to me, but also because I think this is one of those rare films that reach perfection – every edit, every scene, every camera angle, is just perfect.
Thanks again for this great review.
Thank you, Mahendra, always good to hear from Ray devotees.
:O So mUch Info :O � THis Is the MOst AMAzing SIte DUDe� 😀
It is a great review sir. I bumped into this piece quite accidentally.. having watched the movie for the first time a few days back. The observations about the swing and the opera glasses was very apt and original.