My favourite film Essay

Rabindranath Tagore (18611941), poet, playwright, novelist, philosopher, composer, painter, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was the towering figure of the Bengali conversion. Among his measure achievements was the founding in 1921 of his world university, Visva-Bharati, at Santiniketan, slightly 120 miles sum of Kolkata. In 1940, the nineteen-year-old Satyajit radio beam enrolled there to study arts. rheniums father, Sukumarwho died when his rude(a)s was devilhad been a neighboring fri ratiocination of Tagores. neertheless by the eon emit arrived at Santiniketan, the Nobel Laureate had only a year to live, and the two-year-old student saw little of him, feeling daunted by his decrepit status. N 1theless, beam always retained a deep regard for Tagores work, and when, in 1948, he was planning a c arg aner in the cinema, he collaborated with a friend on a screen adaptation of one of Tagores novels, Ghare baire (The Home and the humanity). The project fell th rough, and some years after, rereading the script, actinotherapy found it an amateurish, Hollywoodish effort which would have ruined our reputation and put an end to what ever thoughts I might have had astir(predicate) a ask career. regulate moreessay on favourite movie (Ray in conclusion did germinate the novel, from a tot on the wholey new script, in 1984. ) In 1961, at a time internationally established as a conductor, with The Apu Trilogy, The Music Room (1958), and Devi (1960) to his book of facts, Ray returned to Tagore, renting triplet of his stories as Three Daughters (Teen kanya) and a documentary, Rabindranath Tagore, to celebrate the centenary of the great mans birth. Ray described the latter film, an formalized tri barelye to Indias national poet, as a substantiatebreaking chore. But there wasnt the least sense of a chore about Rays next engagement with Tagores work. Charulata (1964), often rated the managing directors finest filmand the one that, when presse d, he would name as his own somebodyal favorite Its the one with the fewest flawsis adapted from Tagores 1901 novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest). Its widely believed that the bill was inspired by Tagores relationship with his sister-in-law, Kadambari Devi, who committed suicide in 1884 for reasons that have never been fully explained.Kadambari, like Charulata, was beautiful, intelligent, and a gifted writer, and toward the end of his flavour, Tagore admitted that the hundreds of haunting portraits of women that he painted in his later years were inspired by memories of her. salutary from the outset of his career, with Pather panchali (1955), Ray had shown himself to be exceptionally accomplished at transport a full world within a microcosm, focusing in on a small social group while soothe relating it to the wider picture.Virtually all of his finest filmsThe Apu Trilogy, The Music Room, Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), contradictory Thunder (1973), The Middleman (1975) achieve this double perspective. But of all his forty winksing accommodation dramas, Charulata is perhaps the subtlest and most delicate. The setting, as with so many of Rays movies, is his native Kolkata. Its round 1880, and the intellectual ferment of the Bengali Renaissance is at its height. Among the educated middle classes, theres talk of self-determination for India within the British Empireperhaps even comp permite independence.such(prenominal) ideas are often aired in the observatory, the liberal English-language weekly of which Bhupatinath Dutta (Shailen Mukherjee) is the proprietor and editor. A kindly man, but distracted by his all-absorbing political interests, he largely leaves his wife, the graceful and intelligent Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee), to her own resources. The visual elegance and liquidness that Ray achieves in Charulata are immediately evident in the long, all-but-wordless succession that follows the credits and shows us Charu, trapped in the stuffy, brocaded cage of her house, onerous to amuse herself.(At this period, no respectable middle-class Bengali wife could gage out into the city alone. ) Having called to the servant to take Bhupati his tea, she leafs through a rule book lying on the bed, discards it, selects another from the bookshelfthen, hearing noises outside in the street, finds her opera house glasses and flits birdlike from window to window, watching the passersby. A street musician with his monkey, a chanting group of porters trotting with a palanquin, a portly Brahman with his stern umbrella, signifier of his dignified statusall these come under her scrutiny.When Bhupati wanders past, but a couple of feet away but too engrossed in a book to notice her, she turns her glasses on him as strongjust another strange specimen from the intriguing, unattainable outside world. passim this sequence, Rays camera unobtrusively follows Charu as she roams restlessly around the house, framing and reframing her in a ser ial of spacesdoorways, corridors, pillared galleriesthat emphasize some(prenominal) the Victorian-Bengali luxury of her surroundings and her confinement within them.Though subjective shots are largely reserved for Charus glimpses of street life, the tracking shots that mirror her upgrade along the gallery, or move in behind her shoulder as she glides from window to window, likewise break in us the sense of sharing her soothing but trammeled life. The only deviation from this pattern comes after shes retrieved the opera glasses. A fast lateral track keeps the glasses in close-up as she holds them by her side and hurries back to the windows, the camera sharing her impulsive eagerness.nether the credits, weve seen Charu embroidering a wreathed B on a handkerchief as a gift for her husband. When she presents it to him, Bhupati is delighted but asks, When do you find the time, Charu? Evidently, its never occurred to him that she might feel herself at a loose end. But now, become va guely aware of Charus discontent and fearing she may be lonely, he invites her neer-do- hygienic brother Umapada and his wife, Mandakini, to stay, offering Umapada employment as manager of the Sentinels finances. Manda, a featherheaded chatterbox, proves poor company for her sister-in-law.Then Bhupatis juvenilityish cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) unexpectedly arrives for a visit. Lively, enthusiastic, cultured, an aspiring writer, he establishes an immediate rapport with Charu that on both sides drifts insensibly toward love. Calm Without, Fire Within, the title of Rays essay on the Japanese cinema, could apply equally well to Charulata (as the Bengali critic Chidananda Das Gupta has note). The emotional turbulence that underlies the film is conveyed in hints and sidelong gestures, in a fleeting glance or a snatch of song, often betraying feelings only half recognized by the person experiencing them.In a key scene set in the light garden (with more than a nod to Fragonard), Amal lies on his back on a mat, seeking inspiration, while Charu swings herself high above him, reveling in the enthusiasm of her newfound intellectual and erotic stimulation. Ray, as the critic Robin woodwind instrument observed, is one of the cinemas great masters of interrelatedness. This garden scene, which runs some ten minutes, finds Ray at his most intimately lyrical. Its the counterbalance time the action has escaped from the house, and the sense of freedom and release is infectious.From inner evidence, its clear that the scene involves more than one occasion (Charu promises Amal a personally designed notebook for his writings, she presents it to him, he declares that hes alter it), but its cut together to give the impression of a single, continuous event, a seamless emotional crescendo. Two moments in fact attain a level of rapt intensity seldom equaled in Rays work, both underscored by music. The first-class honours degree is when Charu, having just exhorted Amal to write, swings back and forth, singing softly Rays camera swings with her, holding her vista in close-up, for nearly a minute.Then, when Amal finds inspiration, we get a montage of the Bengali writing filling his notebook, line superimposed upon line in a series of cross-fades, while sitar and shehnai gently hail his creativity. In an article in Sight & Sound in 1982, Ray suggested that, to Hesperian audiences, Charulata, with its triangle spot and Europeanized, Victorian ambience, might seem familiar territory, but that beneath the cover of familiarity, the film is chockablock with lucubrate to which the Western beauty has no access. Snatches of song, literary allusions, domestic help details, an entire scene where Charu and her beloved Amal talk in alliterations .. . all give the film a density missed by the Western viewer in his preoccupation with plot, character, the moral and philosophical aspects of the story, and the apparent meaning of the images. Among the details th at might elude the average Western viewer are the perennial allusions to the nineteenth-century novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (183894). A key figure of Bengali literature in the coevals before Tagore, Bankim Chandra (sometimes referred to as the Scott of Bengal) wrote a series of romantic, nationalistic novels and actively fostered the young Tagores career.In the opening sequence, its one of Bankim Chandras novels that Charu takes devour from the bookshelf, while singing his name to herself and when, not long afterward, Amal makes his dramatic first entry, arriving damp-haired and windblown on the wings of a summer storm, hes declaiming a well-known line of the writers. The coincidence points up the kinship between them by contrast, when Bhupati recalls incredulously that a friend couldnt sleep for three nights after reading a Bankim Chandra novel (I told him, You must be crazy ), it emphasizes the empathetic gulf between him and his wife.Music, too, is used to show under lying sympathies Both Charu and Amal are given to breaking spontaneously into song, and two of Tagores compositions act as leitmotifs. We hear the tune of one of them, mamma cite (Who dances in my heart? ), played over the opening images, and Amal sings another, Phule phule ( both bud and every blossom sways and nods in the gentle breeze), that Charu later takes up in the garden scene as they grow ever closer emotionally. (Manda, who has observed the pair together in the garden, afterward trickily sings a line of this song to Amal.) Ray weaves variations on both songs into his score. other that Amal sings for Charu was composed by Tagores older brother Jyotirindranath, the husband of Kadambari Devi. The films underlying theme of pent-up emotions trembling on the limen of expression is counterpointed both on a political levelBhupati and his friends see in the Liberal victory at Westminster in April 1880 the chance of great self-determination for Indiaand in the situation of Char ulata herself, a gifted, sensitive woman animated toward emancipation but slipping unconsciously toward a betrayal of her husband.To Western eyes, all three members of the triangle might seem willfully dimmed or impossibly naive. This again would be a misapprehension born(p) of unfamiliarity with Bengali society, where, as Ray pointed out, a husbands younger brotherin this case, a close cousin, which is much the aforesaid(prenominal) in Bengali custom and termsis traditionally entitled to a privileged relationship with his sister-in-law.This relationship, playfully flirtatious, sweet but chaste, between a wife and her debar, is accepted and even encouraged. Charu and Amal simply stray, half unknowingly, across an weak social border. Ray was always known as a skilled and sympathetic director of actors. Saeed Jaffrey, who starred in The Chess Players (1977), bracketed him and John Huston as gardener directors, who have selected the flowers, know exactly how much light and cheer and water the flowers need, and then let them grow. Soumitra Chatterjee, who made his screen debut when Ray cast him in the title role of the third film of The Apu Trilogy, The World of Apu (1959), gives perhaps the finest of his fifteen performances in Rays films as Amalyoung, impulsive, a touch ridiculous in his irrepressible showing off, bursting with the joy of exploring life in its fullness after his release from the drab confines of a student hostel. Hes superbly matched by the graceful Madhabi Mukherjee as Charu, her expressive features alive with the ever-changing play of unaccustomed emotions that she scarcely knows how to identify, let alone deal with.She had starred in Rays preceding(prenominal) film, The Big City (1963) he described her as a wondrously sensitive actress who made my work very easy for me. The other three chief(prenominal) actors had also appeared in The Big City, though in kidskin roles. Shailen Mukherjee, playing Bhupati, was principally a stage act or this was his first study screen role. Despite his professed inexperience (Ray recalled him saying, Manikda Rays nickname, I know nonentity about film acting.Ill be your pupil, you teach me), he succeeds in making Bhupati a thoroughly likable if remote figure, well-intentioned but far too idealistic and trusting for his own good. Gitali Roys occasional(a) veiled glances hint that Mandakini isnt, perhaps, quite as empty-headed as Charu supposes she certainly isnt above flirting with Amal on her own account. As her husband, Umapada, Shyamal Ghosal expresses with his whole body language his envy and resentment of Bhupatisignals that his brother-in-law of course completely fails to fragment up on.Ray rarely used locations for interiors, preferring whenever possible to create them in the studio, though so subtly are the sets constructed and lit that were rarely aware of the artifice. Charulata includes few exterior scenes almost all the action takes draw a bead on in the lavishly f urnished setting of Bhupatis house. As always, Ray worked closely with his regular art director, Bansi Chandragupta, providing him with an exact layout of the rooms and detailed sketches of the main setups, and accompanying him on trips to the bazaars to find suitable furniture, decorations, and props.The result feels convincingly authentic, evoking a strong sense of period and of a class that ordered their lives, as critic Penelope Houston has put it, by a conscious compromise between Eastern grace and Western decorum. Though he right away acknowledged the contributions of his collaborators, Ray came as close as any director within mainstream cinema to being a complete auteur. Besides scripting, storyboarding, casting, and directing his films, he composed the scores (from Three Daughters on) and even designed the credit titles and publicity posters.Starting with Charulata, he took control of yet another filmmaking head for the hills by operating his own camera. I realized, he e xplained, that working with new actors, they are more confident if they dont see me they are less tense. I remain behind the camera. And I see give and get the exact frame. Charulata was the best received of all Rays films to date, both in Bengal and abroad. In Bengal, it was generally agreed that he had through full justice to the revered Tagoreeven if some people unflurried harbored reservations about the implicitly adulterous subject matter.After seeing the film at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear for best director, Richard Roud noted that it was distinguished by a degree of technical invention that one hasnt encountered before in Rays films, but that all the same, it is not for his technique that one admires Ray so much no enumeration of gems of mise-en-scene would convey the richness of characterization and that breathless grace and shine he manages to draw from his actors. From its lyrical high point in the garden scene, the mood of Charulata gra dually if imperceptibly darkens, moving toward emotional conflict and, eventually, destructiona process reflected in the restriction of camera movement and in the lighting, which grows more shadowy and somber as Bhupati sees his trust betrayed and Charu realizes what shes lost.Inspired, as he readily admitted, by the final shot of Truffauts The four hundred Blows, Ray ends the film on a freeze-frameor rather, a series of freeze-frames. Two hands, Charus and Bhupatis, reaching tentatively out to each other, close but not yet joined. Rays tanpura score rises in a plangent crescendo. On the screen appears the title of Tagores story The Broken Nest. Irretrievably broken? Ray, subtle and unprescriptive as ever, leaves that for us to decide.