dreamdead
02-26-2008, 11:38 PM
Charulata
Belated review for the Berate Raiders' Favorite Films swap
http://www.outlookindia.com/images/madhabi_charulata_370_20040830 .jpg
Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964) is a film composed of subtle, individual epiphanies about 1870s India and righteous, quiet anger over the spiritual and economic malaise that is often prevalent in the wealthy. As such, it explores universal ideas but what the film does so masterfully is the evocation of the particular. Ray gives his scenes such specificity that it’s not until we reflect on the film later that we understand how seamless the film can be for any age or any culture. That, ultimately, is the film’s greatest virtue. It covers universal terrain, but it is always conscious of humanizing that terrain, of particularizing it, so that it never becomes a gloss of humanity in history. Rather, Charulata feels very much about its time, but in a way that opens up its history to us, decades later.
The film explores issues of human psychology and adultery; however, all outward desire is sublimated into the more haunting adultery, that of mental betrayal. Charulata and her brother-in-law, Amal, grow more conscious of a connection between them that is all too obviously missing in Charulata’s interactions with her husband, Bhupati. Though that connection is expected by the Bengali traditions, the sense of warmth that is readily absent from Bhupati, who is more involved in building and distributing a Marxist newspaper than he is in nurturing his wife’s literary ambitions. The nurturing, though, is always there in Amal, who is himself far less masculine in his interactions with the family. There comes a suggestion that the emasculated male better understands women than the intellectual, and while the idea itself isn’t necessarily new the execution is. Ray offers a muted, though always humanistic, study of both Amal and Charulata.
Where the film creeps up on us emotionally is in the conclusion. There is something quietly devastating about watching Bhupati realize his wife’s published new stories from others. He has shown so little investment in her that she reciprocates on this front. And that brings us back, circuitously enough, to the haunting emotional absence that has existed between he and his wife throughout the whole of the film. Though Ray doesn’t get to lay claim to the greatest freeze-frame to end a film, Charulata’s finale has kept creeping up on me for the past week, invading my brain with the small, though certainly not trivial, hope of spiritual rejuvenation. It’s a quiet moment, and a rightful ending to a frequently transcendent film.
88
Belated review for the Berate Raiders' Favorite Films swap
http://www.outlookindia.com/images/madhabi_charulata_370_20040830 .jpg
Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964) is a film composed of subtle, individual epiphanies about 1870s India and righteous, quiet anger over the spiritual and economic malaise that is often prevalent in the wealthy. As such, it explores universal ideas but what the film does so masterfully is the evocation of the particular. Ray gives his scenes such specificity that it’s not until we reflect on the film later that we understand how seamless the film can be for any age or any culture. That, ultimately, is the film’s greatest virtue. It covers universal terrain, but it is always conscious of humanizing that terrain, of particularizing it, so that it never becomes a gloss of humanity in history. Rather, Charulata feels very much about its time, but in a way that opens up its history to us, decades later.
The film explores issues of human psychology and adultery; however, all outward desire is sublimated into the more haunting adultery, that of mental betrayal. Charulata and her brother-in-law, Amal, grow more conscious of a connection between them that is all too obviously missing in Charulata’s interactions with her husband, Bhupati. Though that connection is expected by the Bengali traditions, the sense of warmth that is readily absent from Bhupati, who is more involved in building and distributing a Marxist newspaper than he is in nurturing his wife’s literary ambitions. The nurturing, though, is always there in Amal, who is himself far less masculine in his interactions with the family. There comes a suggestion that the emasculated male better understands women than the intellectual, and while the idea itself isn’t necessarily new the execution is. Ray offers a muted, though always humanistic, study of both Amal and Charulata.
Where the film creeps up on us emotionally is in the conclusion. There is something quietly devastating about watching Bhupati realize his wife’s published new stories from others. He has shown so little investment in her that she reciprocates on this front. And that brings us back, circuitously enough, to the haunting emotional absence that has existed between he and his wife throughout the whole of the film. Though Ray doesn’t get to lay claim to the greatest freeze-frame to end a film, Charulata’s finale has kept creeping up on me for the past week, invading my brain with the small, though certainly not trivial, hope of spiritual rejuvenation. It’s a quiet moment, and a rightful ending to a frequently transcendent film.
88