The Melody of a Cuckoo: A review of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata
The Melody of a Cuckoo: A review of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata Charulata or The Lonely Wife is Satyajit Ray’s sixteenth film. In one of the interviews, he had mentioned that Charulata is his most favourite personal film. Even several critics opine that Charulata is the finest of Ray’s works.Despite being released half a century ago, Charulata continues to amaze film lovers and critics with its aesthetically appealing visuals and lyrical rendering of the story. Charulata is based on Rabindranath Tagore’s novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest). The plot of the story revolves around Charulata (played by Madhabi Mukherjee)– the lonely wife of Bhupati, who runs a political newspaper in Bengal. Although the timeline in the novella is 1900s, Satyajit Ray has adopted it to be in 1880s where the Bengal Renaissance was at its peak. Bhupati is a workaholic, who is highly influenced by Brahmo philosophy and is passionate about bringing a change in society. In his view, modern writers...