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November 30, 2016

Movie Review: Charulata - 1964

Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee), is a woman who feels alone in her marriage.  The husband, Bhupti Dutta(Shalen Mukherjee), is a busy man who is running a fledgling political newspaper.  Bhupti has brought in his cousin, Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee), who is known to be lazy and having no direction.  Others were brought into the home as well, but this story is about these three characters in particular.

It turns out, while yes he is lazy, Amal is quite a talented writer.  Charu finds this out and develops a fondness for him.  Amal did not really show the feelings toward Charulata, but he was young and would not dare cross his cousin.  Bhupti was oblivious to all of this.  Charu grows as a character as she opens up more and more and her talents as a writer start to show.  She and Amal are able to read each others writings and the two form a bond.  Amal, ever the good cousin would not let this happen.


There were some great visuals from this movie, mostly within character faces.  Every emotion from Charu was captured incredibly well.  There was also a lot of singing in this film.  I would not classify it as a musical as the songs were not filled with dialogue but underlying messages.  You can see this is an older film, as storm scenes were not really well done.  In fact, I felt they were a bit lazy as they would come and go extremely quickly and just enough to move the scene to the next part of the story.

Overall, Charulata was not a favorite of mine.  It was slow and you could see there was not going to be an ending that many would be happy about.

This was part of the Criterion Collection.  I received it in a subscription box called Boxwalla.  I review their service on HelloSubscription.com

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