Charulata (1964)

(On Cable TV, January 2022) Ah well—after being unexplainably taken by Satyajit Ray’s The Big City, here’s Charulata to bring me back to normal:—I just find his films uninteresting. This is not necessarily a condemnation of his work—I’m just not particularly taken by the result. Charulata does poke around some interesting themes, as a rich housewife gets bored and finds an intellectual awakening with her husband’s cousin. In a society where people aren’t necessarily free to act on their desires, the film is built around a textured blend of lust, trust and characters weighing the consequences of their next actions. A showy one-shot opening sequence is matched by a closing freeze-frame, with Ray being his usual precise self as a director in-between beginning and end. It’s well-done, evocative of a certain lifestyle and careful about its characters, but I simply wasn’t grabbed by it all. It doesn’t help that the film runs about twice as long as I would have liked, with a very slow pacing combined with a quietness of effect. You can say that Charulata made me appreciate The Big City even more—at least there’s one Ray film that I like, the rest being most appropriate for others.