CHARULATA - A Bird Trapped in a Golden Cage

Released in 1964, Satyajit Ray’s Charulata is an adaptation of Nashtanirh (The Broken Nest), a novella written by Rabindranath Tagore.

The film is about a young, educated and beautiful woman named Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee). She is married to an upper class gentleman Bhupati (Shailen Mukherjee). He is a follower of renaissance of Bengal and runs an English newspaper, ‘The Sentinel’ which aimed to lambaste the British Government in India. 

Bhupati is a loving but distant husband who is mostly absorbed in his intellectual pursuits and pays minimal attention to Charulata.
They live in an enormous house, and other than the domestic help, it’s just the couple, Charulata and her husband in the house. She is bored and lonely and the couple seems to be in no sexual relationship.

Later in the film, Bhupati’s young cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) comes to stay with them for some time. Ray has shown his arrival like a thunderstorm, literally, as a metaphor since Charu’s life was about to go through a swirl.
Amal is a genial and free spirited young man. Charu and Amal begin to spend time and are drawn to each other. Charu begins to fall in love and sensing this, Amal distances himself from Charu as he was unwilling to betray his brother’s trust. This gives the film an ambiguous ending, returning Charu to her lonely existence.

Bhupati later realizes Charu’s love for Amal and is shocked and heart broken. This is where Ray ends the film leaving the rest to the imagination of the audience.

The opening sequence of the film is one of the most extraordinary and brilliant introduction to a film and a character. It sets up and prepares the audience for what they are going to witness for the rest of the film is the epitome of the art of film making.
The opening seven minutes of near silence has no dialogue whatsoever but sets the stage for the film giving all the necessary details forcing the viewer to form a conjecture about the film.
Charulata is a film way ahead of its time talking about adultery and loneliness in the simplest of ways. The film raised questions like, to what extent were educated Indian women expected to abide to a restricted domestic role, creating a conflict between aesthetic existence and the ethical existence.

Inspired, as he has admitted, by the final shot of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Ray ends the film on a freeze-frame or rather, a series of freeze-frames. Two hands, Charu’s and Bhupati’s, reaching tentatively out to each other, close but not yet joined. Ray’s tanpura score rises in a plangent crescendo. On the screen appears the title of Tagore’s story: Nashtanirh. Irretrievably broken? Ray, subtle and unprescriptive as ever, leaves that for us to decide.