When it comes to Indian cinema and its history, one name tops all the others, that of Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). A native of Calcutta, heir to the humanist awakening movement of the Bengali Renaissance, this complete artist, also a writer and a musician, is the author of a cinematographic work of the very first rank, of incredible splendour. Turning his back on traditional genres as well as the commercial shackles of local production, Ray was the first, from the inaugural lament of the trail (Pather Panchali, 1955), to dig the furrow of realism, applied to his contemporaries and their daily life, Indians of the cities and the fields, men, women and children. A beautiful six-film box set, released by Carlotta, makes up for some editorial delay concerning this major filmmaker, who had not yet been entitled to the comfortable setting of Blu-ray.
A double wonder seizes the Western spectator in front of Ray’s films. First of all, before the forms of Bengali sociability, which the filmmaker has filmed so admirably, this set of gestures and human relationships, this adherence of customs to objects, places and clothing, this musicality of language, observed with the greatest clarity and as if for the first time. Then, secondly, faced with the astonishing closeness that the filmmaker establishes with his characters, telling us of the slightest of their soul movements. Most of the films in the box set (five from the 1960s and one later) show a certain propensity for the study of characters right from their titles: The coward (1965), The Saint (1965), The hero (1966) or even Charulata (1964), which displays neither more nor less than the first name of its heroine.
Tear the veil of illusions
In these 1960s, Ray does not only film social profiles, but beings led to transform themselves: either by opening themselves up to the outside world, or caught up in a reality tearing the veil of their illusions. In Charulata, according to Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali poet and Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913), which takes place at the end of the 19thand century, a young wife (Madhabi Mukherjee) abandoned by her husband kills time in their large bourgeois house. Until the day when a cousin (Soumitra Chatterjee) comes to keep him company: his arrival sows movement in this immobile palace and at the same time shakes the heart of its resident. With this new desire is born, in her, a new consciousness. It is the consolidation of her gaze, the gaze of an artist, of a poetess, that Ray stages, through the successive states of her face like a sensitive plate.
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