Join us on Wednesday the 14th of February from 5pm (screening starts at 5:15pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema for a special Valentine’s Day screening of Satyajit Ray’s classic drama Charulata [The Lonely Wife] (1964). The film is 1 hour 57 minutes long so the screening will be finished by 7:15pm.
Cited by Ray as his ‘most flawless film’, this sensitive, moving tale of a neglected housewife in late nineteenth-century Calcutta is adapted from a story by Rabindranath Tagore. Sailen Mukherjee stars as a newspaper journalist, driven more by professional ambition than the needs of his cultured and intelligent wife, Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee). Sensing her loneliness, he enlists the help of his cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee), a sensitive would-be writer, to keep her company. But upon meeting Charulata and Amal feel an immediate connection and their feelings quickly and almost inevitably begin to deepen…
Charulata is universally recognised as a masterpiece, and often viewed as Ray’s best. To read more about it, see Geoff Andrew’s 2014 Sight and Sound article arguing for it as “the pinnacle of Satyajit Ray’s art”, or Philip Kemp’s in-depth discussion of the film for the Criterion release. For a profile of Ray, see this 2002 piece from Senses of Cinema. This screening follows on from our autumn term screening of another of Ray’s masterpieces, The Big City (1963).