Charulata, Satyajit Ray (India, 1964)

Description

Restored Print!
Introduction/Dilip Basu


Dilip Basu is research professor of humanities and founding director of the Satyajit Ray Film Study Center at the University of California Santa Cruz

Ray’s personal favorite of his works, Charulata follows one woman’s romantic and intellectual yearning in a late nineteenth-century India trapped under a constricting mix of “Hindu aestheticism and Victorian morality” (Albert Johnson). Married to a successful, seemingly liberal publisher, Charulata (a stunning Madhabi Mukherjee) passes her lonely days with embroidery and daydreams, until her husband’s handsome cousin arrives to distract her with poetry and attention. Subtly drawing out the cracks of a marriage in crisis, as well as the flowering of a woman’s independence, this dignified character study is based on a Rabindranath Tagore novella, and flows with the grace of Flaubert and James. For The Manchester Guardian, it is simply “a masterpiece,” while Ray himself called it “my best.”

—Jason Sanders

• Written by Ray, based on a novel by Rabindranath Tagore. Photographed by Subrata Mitra. With Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Shyamal Ghoshal, Geetali Roy. (122 mins, In Bengali with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, Restored by the Satyajit Ray Preservation Project through a collaboration of the Academy Film Archive, the Merchant-Ivory Foundation, and the Film Foundation, From Academy Film Archive, permission Janus Films/Criterion Collection)