Charulata

One of the richest, most nuanced, most textured, indeed most beautiful films ever made. Ray’s genius for the cinema was already fully evident with his legendary first work, Pather Panchali - which perhaps unfortunately now largely eclipses the films he made afterwards. Nevertheless, Ray’s explosion onto the film scene with Pather Panchali is comparable only to Welles or Godard in its magnitude and significance. Charulata, however, is as far as I’m concerned far superior. Endearing and enduring as it is, The Apu Trilogy is not conducted with this level of skill or subtlety. Charulata represents a kind of chiselling-down of Ray’s stylistics and aesthetic experimentation. It is refined to the point of near-genuine flawlessness. Although undoubtedly elevated by the film’s status as an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore (who is to Bengal what Shakespeare is to England, Proust to France, Tolstoy to Russia, Dante to Italy, Cervantes to Spain, or Goethe to Germany), this by no means acts as a crutch for Ray. One does not sense a literary impulse in Ray’s treatment of this film; indeed quite the opposite. The opening ten minutes of the film, for instance, a scene of Charu doing nothing, walking round the house by herself, flicking through books and playing with binoculars, is so richly layered with camerawork and set design which is at once elaborate and swooping, fabulously ornate, at once alienating and lingeringly somber. The minutiae of the soundtrack, the rhythmic quality imbued through the editing, it all culminates to something which can only really be described as rich. This extends endlessly throughout the film - to the swing scene, to the depiction of Charu’s visions of inspiration, and most emphatically to the ending. Even though Tagore can be traced in masterful incidents of layered dramatic irony, to a particular scene involving alliterative wordplay, or indeed to the generality of the plot itself, the effect is always fundamentally elicited from Ray’s filmic treatment. I think what I love most about this though, and about Ray more generally, is how unpretentious it all is, how extraordinarily subtly it all plays out. My sense of awe at this film comes more from a sense of Ray’s overall virtuosity than from a sense of formalism or style. It’s popular cinema and high art at the same time, neither occluding the value of the other. It is obvious that Ray is more mature here than in his earlier films and that his approach is more measured, but strangely, it is arguably more experimental, certainly more bold than in earlier works. The ending need only be cited to elucidate that point. I have seen this film before, but I do not feel as though I rewatched it this time with the same eyes. Tagore was only one of the two great Indian artists of the twentieth century. As the chisels of sculptors to marble as the hand of Ray to celluloid.