Old Yorker

  • The Home and the World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ghare Baire

    Satyajit Ray (1984)

    From the start of his career in cinema Satyajit Ray wanted to adapt Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World for the screen.  He eventually did so almost thirty years after Pather Panchali although he suffered two serious heart attacks during shooting and his son Sandip completed the project.   The Home and the World is visually static compared with the Apu films and The Big City.  This may signify Ray’s attainment of a masterly simplicity – Pauline Kael’s laudatory review covers this interestingly – but it also makes the picture, for all its gorgeous colouring, tough to watch.  In the novel Tagore is understood to be arguing with himself about the pros and cons of India’s absorbing or rebelling against Western influences both cultural and commercial, and the implications of Indian women moving from purdah into relative social freedom.  (Female emancipation in Indian society was, of course, one of Ray’s abiding preoccupations.)  The novel is divided into chapters each of which is narrated in the first person by one of the principal characters:  Nikhil, the liberal-minded rajah who believes in social and political advancement through non-violent means and who decides that his wife Bimala should not only have an English education but also emerge from the seclusion of the women’s quarters in his palace; Sandip, his friend and polar opposite in terms of political values, a leader of the Swadeshi movement set up in response to the partition of Bengal (between the Hindu and Muslim communities) by the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, in 1905; and Bimala herself who, at first, has no appetite for seeing men other than her husband but whose life is turned upside down by coming into contact with Sandip and what he represents.

    The first person narrative can be a useful form in which to express political arguments as well as personal feelings but Ray virtually dispenses with it and, when the characters stand or sit articulating their feelings and opinions, the effect is very different.  Political rhetoric comes naturally to Sandip.  Even so, his tendency to expatiate in private as well as from a public platform seems to derive less from the character than from the way that Ray has decided to present the themes of The Home and the World.  They are important and inherently interesting themes but that doesn’t mean that exposure to them is bound to be an absorbing experience:  I struggled to keep awake during some of the monologues.  (The English subtitles to this very wordy film were some of the worst I remember seeing – full of typos, and at one point the titles disappear for around thirty seconds, even though the predominant voice on the soundtrack is speaking in Bengali.)

    The style of The Home and the World puts great pressure on the main actors.  In the case of the two male principals, the events of the story don’t allow them to show many different sides:  their character gives them a place in the scheme and a largely predetermined fate.  And although Bimala does experience radical change we know from her brief introductory voiceover where this has led her to.  That opening speech is nevertheless powerful – words to the effect of:

    ‘I have passed through fire. What was pure in me has been burnt out.  The ashes that are left I have dedicated to him who has received all my sin into the depths of his own divided spirit.’

    Although Bimala could conceivably be talking about either Nikhil or Sandip, you know soon enough that it must be her husband:  Soumitra Chatterjee is charismatic in the role and gets across what dazzles Bimala but, to the viewer, Sandip’s masculine self-confidence and lack of political compromise are transparently selfish.  As the gentle, introverted Nikhil, Victor Banerjee is much more subtly charming and mysterious.  (He occasionally has a look of John Cazale about him here:  the resemblance never occurred to me watching Banerjee as Dr Aziz in A Passage to India, made in the same year – perhaps because he’s not quite as slender in the Lean film as in The Home and the World.)   The intensity of Banerjee and of Swatilekha Chatterjee as Bimala never seems forced – a considerable achievement.  But there’s little in all the rest of the film to match the early, relatively gentle scenes between them and the sequences which describe Bimala’s grudgingly learning the ways of an English lady.  The scene in which Miss Gilby (Jennifer Kendal-Kapoor, in her last film appearance) teaches Bimala a song is breathtaking because of both the loveliness of the two women’s voices and the beguiling cultural confusion.  The song’s lyrics are nostalgic in themselves:  ‘Tell me the tales that to me were so dear/Long, long ago, long, long ago’.   When Bimala sings them to herself later in the film, by which time her life has moved in an unexpected and disorienting direction, the song has an even greater ironic depth and impact.  With Indrapramit Roy as Sandip’s young henchman.

    21 September 2013

  • Charulata

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Satyajit Ray (1964)

    This month’s BFI programme says Charulata (The Lonely Wife) was Satyajit Ray’s favourite among all his films and quotes his description of it as ‘the one film I would make the same way if I had to do it again’.  Like The Home and the World, it’s based on a Rabindranath Tagore work.  In fact, the worlds inside and outside the home are differentiated more strongly in Charulata than in the later film.  The time is the late nineteenth century; the place is Calcutta.  The title character is the beautiful, childless wife of Bhupati, the owner and editor of a local newspaper – a rich man but liberal in his politics.   Charu, as her husband calls her, has much time on her hands:  she embroiders; she likes to write and to read the books in Bhupati’s library, especially lyric poetry.  She’s conscious, however, of her duties as a wife and finds that she hardly needs to keep house, beyond instructing the servants.  The film is formidably disciplined.  In the masterly opening sequences, Ray makes the heroine’s boredom fascinating.  Charu, solitary in the huge house, listens for hints of activity from the street outside.  Whenever she hears something, she opens the shutters and looks through opera glasses to find out more.  She reads another page; she appraises her needlework; but time and the engulfing silence of the house hang heavy.

    Its design and decoration are succinctly informative, if unsurprising.  There are long corridors with many doors, most of them closed; there’s even a caged bird or two.  A card game between Charu and her sister-in-law Manda (Gitali Roy) – although it’s trivial, the outcome matters, in different ways, to both women – is not only well observed but gripping.  Bhupati is preoccupied with his newspaper but doesn’t entirely fail to notice his wife’s ennui and he takes helpful, if patronising, action to help the situation.  He invites his younger cousin, Amol, a would-be poet, to stay – to keep Charu company and to help her with her own writing.  The weather in the house turns symbolically the moment that he arrives:  a storm blows up, Amol materialises, Bhupati’s papers are scattered from his desk.  Ray describes meticulously the growing attraction between Charu and Amol but the film’s slow pace and, in terms of external incident, uneventfulness call for sustained concentration.   It becomes hard to be sure whether the claustrophobia you’re feeling is quite what Ray intends.  Charulata – the film as well as the character – is housebound to such an extent that you experience a real sense of relief when Ray cuts briefly to a horsedrawn cab heading down the street.

    That cab is taking Bhupati to a meeting at which he discovers that his brother Umapada (Shyamal Ghoshal), whom he took on to manage the newspaper, has been swindling him; from this point on, the plot starts to gather momentum.  Amol, knowing that if he stays in the house he too will increasingly betray Bhupati’s trust, leaves before the host or hostess can dissuade him.  Charu’s immediate reaction is to sublimate her distress at Amol’s departure in a show of anger with the long-suffering servant Braja (Bholanath Koyal).   Bhupati and Charu then go to the seaside:  a conversation on the beach offers the prospect of a constructive partnership between husband and wife on the relaunched newspaper (he’ll deal with the politics and she’ll handle creative writing, including her own).  Yet taking the action outside the house brings with it, as well as relief, growing unease – you know that things can now spin out of control.  The couple return home to a letter from Amol; another storm brews up but the man who comes in with the wind this time is only Bhupati.

    This moment reinforces Amol’s absence and Charu can no longer keep her anguish to herself.  Clutching and crumpling Amol’s letter, she breaks down, cries aloud, ‘Why did you leave?’ and is heard by her husband, who then exits too.  He eventually returns and there are final gestures of reconciliation with Charu but these appear to be purely formal.  The film ends with a sequence of stills, the last of them accompanied by the legend ‘The Ruined Nest’ – a translation of the title of the source material, Tagore’s novella Nastanirh.   Madhabi Mukherjee (who also played the protagonist in Ray’s previous film, The Big City) is admirably expressive as Charu; so is Soumitra Chatterjee, whose charisma delivers a real charge when first Amol arrives on the screen.  Shailen Mukherjee deserves credit for his sympathetic playing of the thankless role of Bhupati – as unseeing in his business activity as of what’s going on in his household.  (As Sally noticed, the marriage and Bhupati’s difficulties at work call to mind Nora and Torvald Helmer in A Doll House.)

    22 August 2014

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