zzzorf I wanted to like this movie. The storyline seemed interested and the non-song and dance Indian movies I had seen so far had been of quite a good standard. This however did not do it for me. The movie moved along very slowly, enough that I started to find myself drifting off to sleep at different moments in time.Don't get me wrong though, the story was still good and I would love to see it again in a redo, but as it stands as is, I have to pass on it.

berfedd Plot: In 1890s India, a wife's relationship with her cousin-in-law disrupts the stability of the whole household.Review: The first ten minutes of this movie are simply of bored housewife, Charulata (Madhabi Mucherjee), wandering about her apartment. It is mesmerising. Other characters appear one by one, all members of her extended family. A male cousin-in-law is something of a soul mate, and they mutually encourage each other to start writing as a pastime, but when he decided to publish his work relationships subtly change.Actually, I wasn't always exactly sure what was going on. I think there were some cultural subtexts at play that I am not at privy to. I was afraid that I might have picked up something tedious, but it was nothing of the sort. It is a beautiful movie. There is a humour and lightness of touch that is very refreshing. I particularly liked the contrast between the newspaper editor husband who clearly takes his work very seriously, and the lack of fulfilment or focus in other people's lives around him. Acting, cinematography, lighting, sound, locations, shot composition, all are done so well, and the story is accessible enough to make it enjoyable to any audience. It's the kind of movie that leaves a pleasurable feeling afterwards, knowing that one has watched something of quality, even if one is not exactly sure why.

Camoo Satyajit Ray is so good at staging his scenes from inside the minds of his characters, and I think it is why he was so successful at crossing over to foreign audiences - his empathy for the people behind his characters. He always reached to get beyond the simple exchange of dialog - watching a Ray film is watching him carefully invade the mind of his creations. Their flaws, their desires, their loves all seem so universal coming from his camera. The photography is one of the greatest joys of Charulata, as in most of his films - the camera feels so free, so unbound to any set formula or rule of how to operate it, the joy of the operator (Ray himself) so apparent. It glides throughout all of his films, playing the eyes of some omniscient presence the characters are sometimes semi aware of. We are jolted when they look into the camera and sing, but because we have been already lulled into his world it feels completely natural that they would sing to us. Charulata is slower, more obtuse than some of Ray's earlier films, and it feels longer. I was underwhelmed by the story, which I felt took too many left turns. But Charulata is a persistently fascinating film, particularly the almost out-of-body performance by Soumitra Chatterjee.

Spleen I remember reading through Satyajit Ray's list of things that people from outside India would fail to get in "Charulata" – of all his films (up to 1980, anyway) the one he thought was most "superficially" accessible to Westerners – and thinking to myself: "But I DID get all this... at least, more or less."In Bengal society (Ray writes) a woman's brother-in-law holds a privileged position; the two are EXPECTED to form a special friendship, and she is allowed to be more intimate with him than with anyone else to whom she's not related by blood (apart, of course, from her husband). Ray is right. Most Westerners don't know this. I certainly didn't. But we're able to infer as much of it as matters from the film itself: we can tell that Amal and Charulata expect, before they fall properly in love, a fair degree of freedom in negotiating their friendship; that this is okay by Bhupati; that this isn't considered odd by any of the participants; that it (probably) WOULD be considered odd were Amal an outsider... and we can tell a good deal more besides; this is, as everyone acknowledges, a film of exceedingly rich characterisations. What we CAN'T tell from the film alone is the extent to which the expectations and roles of the three central characters are duplicated in other marriages across India. But this doesn't matter. This is a chamber drama, not an allegory.Ray also lists some literary allusions which Westerners are almost certain to be blind to, but again, I think he's underestimated the extent to which he gets across, in the film alone, all he needs to get across. We can tell, from the way the characters react, what the allusions mean; just as an allusion to Achilles' heel, if properly used, will make sense to (and add depth for) an audience entirely unfamiliar with Greek legend. Even the film's makes sense to outsiders in a way Ray thinks it won't. It's a Scottish tune (I know this because I recognised it, but you can tell it's Scottish even if you don't) with Bengali lyrics; we can tell it's a Western song, from (more or less) the land which currently rules over India, which at least some Indians have adopted as their own, which is popular enough for Amal to expect others to be familiar with it, etc. (I have to admit, though, that something was being conveyed by the lyrics that wasn't being adequately conveyed by the subtitles.)It's a tribute to Ray's skill that even he doesn't realise just how much context he's managed to import into "Charulata". Of course, he's right in that nobody will get everything; Ray himself admits to not understanding the meaning of his own (hopeful? cautious? distancing?) final freeze frame ("I only knew that it was the right way to end the film"), and, I need hardly add, I don't either.Ray was wrong to think that the allusions fall flat on Western ears or that some of the necessary social context is impenetrable, but the film would still have something to offer even if he weren't: the characters would still be as alive and real, the respect with which they're treated would be just as apparent; the film would still, in short, be a beautiful one.