review for Charulata on AllMovie

Satyajit Ray's Charulata, one of the films of which the director was most proud, begins and ends with two sequences of beautiful, and justly praised, cinematic poetry. The film opens on Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee), a sheltered 19th century housewife, viewing the world outside her bedroom windows through a pair of opera glasses. She then goes into the hallway, where her husband, Bhupati (Sailen Mukherjee), walks by absorbed in a book. As he walks away she turns her opera glasses on him. This dialogue-less sequence deftly establishes her character and her relationship to the world and her husband. The film's famous conclusion, a series of freeze frames, beautifully crystallizes their now greatly changed relationship. Between these two points, Charu will transform herself from traditional, kept housewife to modern woman, with the help of Bhupati's brother, the charmingly wayward poet Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee). Filled with moments that can only be called "pure cinema," Charulata is both the story of a love triangle and a microcosm of a traditional society moving slowly and painfully into modernity.