SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Let's be realistic.

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Also known as THE LONELY WIFE for the anglophone, adapted from Tagore's novella, CHARULATA is Satyajit Ray's sally into the Bengali upper class of the Victorian Calcutta in the 1880s, and the titular heroine is Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee, the leading actress in THE BIG CITY 1963), a young wife of Bhupati (Shailen Mukherjee), a liberal-minded intellectual who runs a politcal newspaper "the Sentinel". The plot moves in a glacial pace and Ray patiently magnifies Charu's stagnation and boredom with so unobtrusive a dexterity that we might not even realize our own brazen intrusion, house-bound and lassitude-stricken, Charu takes pleasure in reading, but her reading material is too sentimental for her husband's noble taste, only if a kindred spirit would crop up to keep her company, and that man is Amal (Soumitra Chatterkee), Bhupati's cousin who has just graduated from college, and is endowed with a luxury of an indeterminate goal in life, apart from a flair for literature and music similar to Charu. A workaholic notwithstanding, Bhupati is fully aware of Charu's loneliness, whose life is disproportionally constituted by wandering in their fancy domicile, perusing from books to magazines and playing cards. He is also judicious enough to discern Charu's knack of writing, so he consigns Amal to secretly motivate her into writing her own stories, a mission too challenging for a drippy Amal to accomplish, instead he is actuated to write an essay himself and consequently gets it published, which causes a seismic jolt in Charu.At first, Charu's reaction seems irrational, but what Ray hammers home to viewers is the metaphor of writing, to Charu it is established as a liberation of her suppressed feelings, a kindred spirit that she connects with a laidback, youthful Amal but not with her mature and loving husband, that is why she asks Amal to keep his writing private, because it is forbidden. Once the simple-minded Amal publishes his work, it stirs Charu as an initiation of her own countermove, a some sort of subconscious competition she knows she can no longer resist, and it turns out, she is the more talent writer, she declares her affection to Amal, in a subtle fashion of preparing for his paan, it wrong-foots Amal and the fallout is tangibly presaged by a shot of both behind the iron bars of the window.When Bhupati's fourth estate undertaking comes in for a severe setback due to a betrayal of trust, a deeply guilt-ridden Amal can not bear of adding insult to injury and chooses to abscond by himself, which leaves a devastating Charu in the lurch, ultimately its maudlin coda shatters the seemingly propitious emotional renewal of the couple with an equivocal gesture (materializes almost like a glitch) after Bhupati gets a glimpse of Charu's wailing over his departed cousin. As accomplished as one can contest for its artistry, particularly of its majestic composition against the impeccably designed interior setting and a steady hand in emotional drilling (Madhabi Mukherjee is a beady heads-turner and Soumitra Chatterjee exudes sympathetic insouciance most of the time), CHARULATA cannot convince this reviewer that it is Ray's best, as a profound demonstration of a wife/woman's internment and emancipation off her own bats, it teeters on the thin edge of over-egging the central melodrama, by comparison, THE BIG CITY is a much competent chord-striker.

This beautiful film from Director Satyajit Ray has a lot of things going for it, the story of repressed passion, of course, but also elements of philosophy and politics, as well as some absolutely sumptuous sets. Based on Tagore's novella 'Nastanirh', which itself was based on Tagore's own attraction to his brother's wife, 'Charulata' tells the tale of the growing attraction between a cousin (Amal, played by Soumitra Chatterjee) who visits a newspaper publisher (Shailen Mukherjee), and the publisher's wife, Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee). The pair are encouraged to spend time together by the publisher, who loves his wife but is too busy with his job to spend time with her, and the feelings they begin to have are subtle and begin with discussions of writing. There are some nice moments with Amal singing to Charulata, as well as a fantastic scene with her swinging while he lays in the grass beside her. This is a subtle, deft, perfectly told story; the betrayal is contained to emotions, not physical acts, and is more powerful as a result. All of the actors turn in excellent performances, and Ray's direction is brilliant. The philosophical moments elevate the film ala Bergman, and here are a couple of quotes:"I was thinking all of life is like a rhythm. Birth…death. Day…night. Happiness…sorrow. Meeting…parting. Like the waves on the ocean, now rising…now falling. One complements the other." "Even as Prince Abhimanyu, while still in the womb, learned only how to penetrate enemy formations, but not how to withdraw. So a river, emerging from the mountain's rocky womb, can only advance and knows not how to turn back. O river! O youth! O time! O world! You too can only march onward. You never turn back along the path strewn with memory's gilded pebbles. Only the mind of man looks back. The rest of creation never does."

The lonely wife (Madhabi Mukherjee) of a newspaper editor (Sailen Mukherjee) falls in love with her visiting cousin-in-law (Soumitra Chatterjee), who shares her love for crafting literature.I make no secret of the fact that I simply do not care for Indian films. I can't really express why, but they do not appeal to me. With regard to Ray, I was not moved by the Apu trilogy. However, after seeing "The Music Room" (1958) I found there was at least one Indian film I liked.And now "Charulata". Much has been written about how this film has more of a Western sense to it, even invoking the name of Mozart. That may be so. But I also appreciate that at this point Ray had access to better equipment, apparently. Cinematography-wise, this is his best-looking film, and he experiments a little bit in a dreamlike way that I find very effective. We have the right balance -- not that low grade film India had in the past, and not the overly polished junk of Bollywood. This and "Music Room" may be the pinnacle of Indian film.

Satyajit Ray is so good at staging his scenes from inside the minds of his characters, and I think it is why he was so successful at crossing over to foreign audiences - his empathy for the people behind his characters. He always reached to get beyond the simple exchange of dialog - watching a Ray film is watching him carefully invade the mind of his creations. Their flaws, their desires, their loves all seem so universal coming from his camera. The photography is one of the greatest joys of Charulata, as in most of his films - the camera feels so free, so unbound to any set formula or rule of how to operate it, the joy of the operator (Ray himself) so apparent. It glides throughout all of his films, playing the eyes of some omniscient presence the characters are sometimes semi aware of. We are jolted when they look into the camera and sing, but because we have been already lulled into his world it feels completely natural that they would sing to us. Charulata is slower, more obtuse than some of Ray's earlier films, and it feels longer. I was underwhelmed by the story, which I felt took too many left turns. But Charulata is a persistently fascinating film, particularly the almost out-of-body performance by Soumitra Chatterjee.