Charulata

Ibsen via Rabindranath Tagore, Lubitsch's That Uncertain Feeling as bonus. "Not something to get used to," loneliness, the wife (Madhabi Mukherjee) negotiates it with binoculars at the mansion's shuttered windows. The husband (Shailen Mukherjee) is fond and comfortable and a revolutionary in his own mind, his newspaper (The Sentinel) is where "Truth survives." Her brother (Shyamal Ghoshal) is unwisely appointed treasurer, her sister-in-law (Gitali Roy) is content with card games and dozes off during discussions on beauty, definitely "a traditional woman." Fresh out of college, the husband's cousin (Soumitra Chatterjee) arrives with a gust of wind and an incantation of Krishna. "Quite the literary bent," encouraged and debated and flirted with, central to the romantic triangle that forms subtly, devastatingly. Politics and poetry in Victorian Calcutta, Satyajit Ray's masterpiece on the expression of eroticism and the eroticism of expression. A hint of Mallarmé for the virginal notebook waiting to be filled, the young wastrel dedicates himself to it in the garden while the heroine sways on the swing in a reverie of her own, cf. Partie de Campagne. "Light of a Moonless Night," not a scientific article, not the real thing to the earnest progressive more concerned with English elections. (The Gladstone bust on his desk is but one detail in a dense mise en scène of Wyleresque interiors.) Memories from home are grist to the mill of the budding authoress, the camera drinks in her pensive visage in close-up as inspiration strikes, first "The Cuckoo's Call" then "The Cuckoo's Lament" and finally "My Village." The prison of luxury, the song of discovery, the sting of betrayal, crystalline portraits of cultivated characters alarmed by the force of their own emotions. Extended hands and fragile lanterns for the impasse at the close, a frozen stretto. "Still trying to revive the dead soldier?" Ray revisits and distills the situation in The Home and the World. Cinematography by Subrata Mitra. In black and white.