Charulata - A classic revisited

I

It is impossible to escape Ray’s films without a strong emotional impact. It remains with the viewer for a long time. This feeling emerges from the visual impact of compositions. One gets the feeling of walking on a richly textured carpet and tends to ponder over them. The scenes often open engulfing the surrounding and the subject is not so important but as we progress, we come closer to the subject. Once we approach the subject the camera movement stops, it doesn’t flicker from the face, and stays there trying to capture every small movement in emotion. They are dramatic and to understand this drama, characters are given time and more than that audiences are given time to understand the predicament and tension within the character. In Charulata – the lonely wife – Amal and Bhupati’s faces are projected over the screen and we are made to almost confront them. Every now and then Charulata’s face occupies the screen space and we move forward with the story by following the subtle changes in the emotions overpowering the face.
Satyajit Ray’s characters don’t speak for or against each other. At least that is not the ploy used to progress in the story or depict the emotional maturity of the characters. Amal or Bhupati would always speak in the terminology of the ‘universal’. The film beautifully shows, and it is evident, the tension between this ‘universal’ and the ‘Indian core’ – of trying to amalgamate these two ‘opposites’. And the dialogues are meant to bring forward this. Bhupati doesn’t have a personal and individual connection with his wife, even that possibility is torn between these ‘opposites’.
Drama is evident in Ray’s craft, but the heightened nature of it is mellowed by an emphasis on the space – a haveli, a staircase, a verandah, and a highly innovative use of silence. For Ray, cinema is a profoundly visual medium and speech is secondary to that visual intensity. In Charulata also, the execution point is camera. Ray’s conception of a scene is grand because at the end of the film, and the noticeable point is that we are talking about a film where interpersonal relationships are the focal point, what remains in memory is the photographic precision. It is solid and to the point. The auteur’s signature is difficult to avoid.
What Charulata reconfirms about Ray, is the playful tendency with which he deals with the heightened Indian sense of melodrama but remains within the limits of his craft. In spite of his commitment for the popular mode, and reaching out to avant garde by being there, he avoids falling in the trap of this ‘Indian core’ – the over-reactive self. The stories are told with sincerity for the Indian ethos and they resonate with elements from Indian theatrical traditions – loud and outspoken – but give it a new restrained dimension in the film medium.

Kalyan


II
Charulata is a film about communication between two human beings, between human beings and the world. Silence, speech, writing, music all appear as characters in the film. Of these writing and more specifically publishing has a special place – Bhupati writes through his newspaper ‘The Sentinel’ which he himself publishes, Amal tries to write essays and novels which Charulata does not want published, Charulata writes and publishes to prove a point in her relationship with Amal. Charulata does not read The Sentinel, Bhupati does not read Charulata’s essay in Vishwabandhu. It is as if they were living on two different islands, neither friends nor enemies. After Amal leaves, Charulata and Bhupati are together on a seaside and she suggests a joint effort to restart the newspaper. Their coming together is symbolised in this dream of a joint publication albeit with two separate sections in two different languages – English for him and Bengali for her. The differences are too vast, almost insurmountable.
Indeed Charulata is a lonely wife as the film’s title tells us – yet it is not an ordinary loneliness. It loneliness in a deeper sense – of inhabiting an island, and thus her love for Amal is not a mere desire for an affair to fill a gap – it is the desire for communication and companionship. Ray’s choice of the Tagore song ‘ami chini go chini tomare ogo bideshini’ is a superb metaphor for the Amal – Charulata relationship. Through the song Amal claims to know the lady from a foreign land across the seas. He has heard her song, he has wandered through the world and arrived at her doorsteps in a strange land, he is the guest requesting her hospitality and ready to give his heart in return.
When creatures from different worlds meet seeing is not recognising, looking is not seeing, hearing is not listening. Both Charulata and Amal look at Bhupati through glasses. Charulata looks at the world through glasses lifting blinds of her windows – the same world through different windows. She looks at Amal through glasses in the beginning.
Marriage – clearly from the example of Charulata and Bhupati – ensures neither love, nor companionship nor understanding. What does one make of Bhupathi’s insistence that Amal should marry because the prospective father in law will send him to Europe? Is it mere greed or opportunism – or practical considerations that one accepts as ways of the world? It is important that Bhupathi is not portrayed as a inconsiderate, cruel villain – which is what makes Satyajit different – but he is shown as trapped in the ‘trappings’ of the Bhadralok of his age.
The film ends in a freeze with Charulata inviting her husband to enter the house, and the old retainer holding up a lamp against the storm. The last word on the screen is ‘noshtoneedh’ (whose closer transliteration would be ‘broken nest’) in Bengali which is translated as ‘The End’ in English. It is another playful pun by Ray – the end of a relationship, the end of trust, or is it the end of claustrophobia?

Paromita