Satyajit Ray (1964)
This month’s BFI programme says Charulata (The Lonely Wife) was Satyajit Ray’s favourite among all his films and quotes his description of it as ‘the one film I would make the same way if I had to do it again’. Like The Home and the World, it’s based on a Rabindranath Tagore work. In fact, the worlds inside and outside the home are differentiated more strongly in Charulata than in the later film. The time is the late nineteenth century; the place is Calcutta. The title character is the beautiful, childless wife of Bhupati, the owner and editor of a local newspaper – a rich man but liberal in his politics. Charu, as her husband calls her, has much time on her hands: she embroiders; she likes to write and to read the books in Bhupati’s library, especially lyric poetry. She’s conscious, however, of her duties as a wife and finds that she hardly needs to keep house, beyond instructing the servants. The film is formidably disciplined. In the masterly opening sequences, Ray makes the heroine’s boredom fascinating. Charu, solitary in the huge house, listens for hints of activity from the street outside. Whenever she hears something, she opens the shutters and looks through opera glasses to find out more. She reads another page; she appraises her needlework; but time and the engulfing silence of the house hang heavy.
Its design and decoration are succinctly informative, if unsurprising. There are long corridors with many doors, most of them closed; there’s even a caged bird or two. A card game between Charu and her sister-in-law Manda (Gitali Roy) – although it’s trivial, the outcome matters, in different ways, to both women – is not only well observed but gripping. Bhupati is preoccupied with his newspaper but doesn’t entirely fail to notice his wife’s ennui and he takes helpful, if patronising, action to help the situation. He invites his younger cousin, Amol, a would-be poet, to stay – to keep Charu company and to help her with her own writing. The weather in the house turns symbolically the moment that he arrives: a storm blows up, Amol materialises, Bhupati’s papers are scattered from his desk. Ray describes meticulously the growing attraction between Charu and Amol but the film’s slow pace and, in terms of external incident, uneventfulness call for sustained concentration. It becomes hard to be sure whether the claustrophobia you’re feeling is quite what Ray intends. Charulata – the film as well as the character – is housebound to such an extent that you experience a real sense of relief when Ray cuts briefly to a horsedrawn cab heading down the street.
That cab is taking Bhupati to a meeting at which he discovers that his brother Umapada (Shyamal Ghoshal), whom he took on to manage the newspaper, has been swindling him; from this point on, the plot starts to gather momentum. Amol, knowing that if he stays in the house he too will increasingly betray Bhupati’s trust, leaves before the host or hostess can dissuade him. Charu’s immediate reaction is to sublimate her distress at Amol’s departure in a show of anger with the long-suffering servant Braja (Bholanath Koyal). Bhupati and Charu then go to the seaside: a conversation on the beach offers the prospect of a constructive partnership between husband and wife on the relaunched newspaper (he’ll deal with the politics and she’ll handle creative writing, including her own). Yet taking the action outside the house brings with it, as well as relief, growing unease – you know that things can now spin out of control. The couple return home to a letter from Amol; another storm brews up but the man who comes in with the wind this time is only Bhupati.
This moment reinforces Amol’s absence and Charu can no longer keep her anguish to herself. Clutching and crumpling Amol’s letter, she breaks down, cries aloud, ‘Why did you leave?’ and is heard by her husband, who then exits too. He eventually returns and there are final gestures of reconciliation with Charu but these appear to be purely formal. The film ends with a sequence of stills, the last of them accompanied by the legend ‘The Ruined Nest’ – a translation of the title of the source material, Tagore’s novella Nastanirh. Madhabi Mukherjee (who also played the protagonist in Ray’s previous film, The Big City) is admirably expressive as Charu; so is Soumitra Chatterjee, whose charisma delivers a real charge when first Amol arrives on the screen. Shailen Mukherjee deserves credit for his sympathetic playing of the thankless role of Bhupati – as unseeing in his business activity as of what’s going on in his household. (As Sally noticed, the marriage and Bhupati’s difficulties at work call to mind Nora and Torvald Helmer in A Doll House.)
22 August 2014
