Charulata (1964)

The lonely wife of a newspaper editor falls in love with her visiting cousin-in-law, who shares her love for literature.

Director:

Satyajit Ray

Writers:

Rabindranath Tagore (from the story "Nastaneer"), Satyajit Ray (scenario)

Stars:

Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Shailen Mukherjee

Top Rated Indian Movies #68 | 2 wins & 1 nomination.

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Soumitra Chatterjee	...	Amal
Madhabi Mukherjee	...	Charulata
Shailen Mukherjee	...	Bhupati Dutta (as Sailen Mukherjee)
Shyamal Ghoshal	...	Umapada
Gitali Roy	...	Mandakini
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Tarapada Basu
Gopaldas Bhattacharya
Dilip Bose	...	Shashanka
Ramesh Chandra Chandra
Sunilkanta Dasgupta
Nilotpal Dey	...	Joydeb
Bankim Ghosh	...	Jagannath
Ajit Gupta
Bholanath Koyal	...	Braja
Kamu Mukherjee

Storyline

Charu lives a lonely and idle life in 1870s India. Although her husband Bhupati devotes more time to his newspaper than to their marriage, he sees her loneliness and asks his brother-in-law,Umapada to keep her company. At the same time Bhupati's own cousin, Amal, a would-be writer comes home finishing his college education. However, after several months, Charu and Amal's feelings for each other move beyond literary friendship.

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Plot Keywords:

character name as title | forename as title | newspaper | literature | loneliness | 

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Genres:

Drama | Romance

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Did You Know?

Trivia

"The Exile of Seeta (Sita)" is the story of the exiling of Seeta, the goddess consort of the god Vishnu (also known as Rama). Vishnu exiled Seeta after she had been rescued from imprisonment. Seeta had been away from her husband's home and this was not acceptable culturally, even though Seeta had been chaste in her imprisonment.

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Goofs

When Bhupati shows Amal his weekly newspaper 'The Sentinel', he reads the details as " 24th issue of the sentinel dated April the 9th, 1879' but when Amal sees it, the date is printed on the newspaper as 7 April, 1879.

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Quotes

Charulata: [discussing the writings of Bankim-babu] What descriptions! His women are so beautiful! So much perfection isn't right. They make me feel ugly. They're all so beautiful. Mrinalini's beautiful, Radharanfs beautiful, Saibalini's beautiful, Kapalkundala's beautiful...
Amal: And Kundanandini?
Charulata: She's beautiful too, but not perfect.
Amal: Lutfunnessa's not perfect either. She's too tall and her lips are bit thin.
Charulata: And she's dark-skinned.

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Connections

Referenced in Afterglow (2012)

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Soundtracks

God Save The Queen
(uncredited)
Music by Thomas Augustine Arne
Played on the Piano by Amol (Kumar Basu)

User Reviews

Not given publicity it richly deserves

The best Satyajit Ray movie. Ray, at his peak, gave us his most convincing insight into love and loyalty, two of his universal themes. Unfortunately, the brilliant Apu trilogy has more of an visceral draw to Western audiences and Charulata is overlooked. The Apu trilogy invokes the idea of the Western view of India right or wrong while Charulata almost represents an anomaly of upperclass Indians in the late Victorian era.

Charulata actually is a better film than any of those in the Apu trilogy (as hard as that is to believe) not to mention the most visually striking. However, the one thing Apu trilogy has over Charulata is its freshness. But this almost the same situation as Martin Scorsese and Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. This is not to say that he didn't make any good movies after that. Goodfellas is perhaps his best.

In the end, Ray had style as well as substance in many of his films and Charulata represents that pinnacle while the Apu trilogy establishes what was to come.

Details

Country:

India

Language:

Bengali

Release Date:

17 April 1964 (India)

Also Known As:

Charulata: The Lonely Wife

Box Office

Gross USA:

$77,820

Company Credits

Production Co:

R.D.Banshal & Co.

Technical Specs

Runtime:

117 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1