Blu-ray, DVD Release: Charulata

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Aug. 20, 2013
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion


Charulata

Madhabi Mukherjee is Charulata.

The 1964 film drama Charulata about a woman’s artistic and romantic yearning by the great Bengali director Satyajit Ray (The Music Room) is set in late 19th century, pre-independence India.

It takes place in the gracious home of a liberal-minded, workaholic newspaper editor (Sailen Mukherjee) and his lonely, stifled wife, Charulata (The Big City’s Madhabi Mukherjee), whose exquisitely composed features mask a burning creativity. When her husband’s poet cousin (Soumitra Chatterjee) comes to stay with them, Charulata finds herself both inspired by him to pursue her own writing and dangerously drawn to him physically.

Based on a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata is a work of subtle textures, a delicate tale of a marriage in jeopardy and a woman taking the first steps toward establishing her own voice.

Presented in Bengali with English subtitles, the DVD and Blu-ray contain the following features:

• New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interview program with actors Madhabi Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee
Adapting Tagore, a new interview program featuring Indian film scholar Moinak Biswas and Bengali literature historian Supriya Chaudhuri
• Archival audio interview with director Satyajit Ray by film historian Gideon Bachmann
• New English subtitle translation
• A booklet featuring an essay by critic Philip Kemp and a 1980s interview with Ray by his biographer Andrew Robinson

 

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.