 How do you say happy birthday? How do you sing the happy birthdays on in India? I am the Khargis. Hey, welcome back to our show, the director of XZE's Corbin. Rick. And you follow us on Instagram. Instagram. We are from all juicy content. We are. It's so juicy. Thank you, we're so sorry. Twitter can't ring the bell, we don't have notifications, squad. Bang! Boom. There he goes. Bang, boom, and there it is. Today is the, what is today, Rick? Today is the 100th birthday of Satya Jitray. Happy birthday, Satya Jitray. You. Indeed. Beautiful, brilliant man. So in honor of him, we watched another one of his films. So our fourth, technically, but if you don't count up the Apu trilogy as a whole. Actually our fifth, because we can include two, the short film as one of his work. So this would actually be our fifth of his creations. We're basically experts. So, no we do. Also, so we reviewed Charulata. Charulata. How do you say? Yeah, if you're speaking it from a Hindi background, it would be Charulata. If you're speaking it with a Bengali background, it would be Charulata. Charulata. Charulata. Charulata. Sorry. Anyway, but obviously directed by Satya Jitray in 1964, written, but it's an adapted screenplay from a original story. Correct. Correct, yeah, from a novella. And he composed it. Correct. Dang. He went all Vishal Bharwaj on us. He's a man of many talents. But it's starring a bunch of Gs, if you know what I mean. Bengalis. Yeah. Do we call them Gs? No, we do. They're known as the Gs. Yeah, no. How do you say their names, Rick, for me? Sumitra Chatterjee, Madhavi Mukherjee, or Mukherjee, and then Shalene Mukherjee. Yes. And the synopsis for this is a lonely wife of a newspaper editor falls in love with her visiting cousin-in-law who shares her love for literature. That gives away a lot, doesn't it? Yeah, for a film that has very little to tell you, that kind of just gives you all of it in a nutshell right there. Yeah, stupid IMDB. Yeah, come on. Anyways, obviously it came out in 1964, so it's 100% spoilers. So go watch it and come back if you don't want to be spoiled. That's how we do things. Correct. You had plenty of time to watch it in... Yeah, you've had plenty of time to watch this film. We've only been introduced to Indian film for a year. And how long have you been introduced to Indian film, huh? Idiots. Getting mad at us for not seeing things yet, huh? Idiots. Anyways, so Rick, initial thoughts? Mixed emotions, mostly and only positive in regard to it because the main thing about it is just, cinematically, he just shows once again, in fact, his use of black and white and his ability to... There's so much to say about him and what he does as a director and a cinematographer and framing shots and pacing and everything else. He's just one of the greatest directors I've ever seen. There were parts of it where it's... I have a feeling some of the subtleties of what came out of the novel as well as the cultural representations he was giving us are probably lost on me. I think what wasn't lost are some of the subtleties relationally between people. But I think this period in India and Bengal and Calcutta's history, some of the political undertones and overtones that were associated with this as well as the social undertones, I probably would have appreciated some of that a lot more. But I can go on and on and on and on and on about him and his directing. While I found her to be cinematically captivating on screen, there were points. I just kind of, this has been nitpicky, but I guess I kind of wasn't capturing what I've heard some people say about the film, the sizzling undertones and tensions. I could sense they were there, but they weren't as believable for me. I felt a lot of it was almost statuesque versus flesh and blood at times. That's my only real critique is in that sense of the actual inhabiting of the characters, particularly for Madhavi Mukherjee playing Charolota. Oh, you froze. Oh, did I? Am I frozen? You're gone. And now you're back. Okay, cool. I didn't freeze on my end, so that was weird. Okay, good, good, good, good, good. Anyways, yeah, so let's start with Sausageit Rai. Yeah, there's a lot of shots in this where I was just like, it was just so beautiful, and it was just black and white, which is insane. So I think it was what we said in the poo as well. Some of the shots were just so beautiful, and some of the innovation he did in 1964 in terms of some shots is just brilliant. One of my favorite being the swing shot. Yes, yes. Where he was following her back and forth, and then he did the pan over to him, and it was back and forth with him, but it was, I don't know what contraption he used for it at that time. There wasn't a ton back in the day for it, because their cameras were massive. Yeah, they were. And his choice to do it in black and white was definitively a choice, because in 1964, color was booming. So films were being done in color. He clearly was an artist who's like my palette, I'm doing black and white, my friends. I mean, that was my first note in one of the first frames of film was, this is a man who knows black and white, and he's different. I would actually say he's more aware of and uses black and white more like Orson Welles and Frank Capra than even Hitchcock. Hitchcock was brilliant with black and white, but he was pretty straightforward with it. And I think this is a great comparison. I think Satyit Rai uses black and white the way Sanjay Leela Bansali uses light and color in his films. That awareness of the aesthetic and the medium in which you're working, like there was one shot toward the end. It's just, it's his choice of shot where he's at the foot of the bed that has this wood railing at the bottom that you can see through. And she comes walking into frame and as she does, he takes a, I don't think they had it on a dolly. I think it was walked. And he just goes from the one point to the other, which as you know now, you just digitize that movement. You just program where you want the camera to go and it's on the dolly and the cameraman sits there. And it just goes from point one to point two that you've set up for the shot and it's smooth. And it was, and yeah, that swing shot, especially on her. I mean, it went over to him as she was swinging by, but the shy was like, are they sitting on her lap? Is she holding the camera right now? I didn't know what to do. Did they hang it over the top? Hang it and attach it maybe? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe she was on like an actual swing, but they, in front of like the regular things, they put the swing rope in front of it to make it look like this. And kind of like a camera trick almost. I don't know. I wrote this down too, that he's the anti-Quinton Tarantino. And that Quintin, as you know, is the quintessential dialogue man. I mean, everything is dialogue driven with Quintin and Rye just is very selective. Purposefully. What he allows to be spoken. Cause I don't think there was one word in the first 10 minutes of the film. It was 10 minutes before somebody spoke. He says much, much, much, much more with his visuals than he does with his scripts. I read a article about it after and some person said in the interview, you guys can tell us this is true, that he in an interview, he said this is his favorite of his works. He would change almost nothing about this film and he would change a lot about a lot of his other stuff. Said this is one I would change the least amount if I had to redo it again. I would say, yeah, it's by far his most polished in terms of recognizing this is a man at this point in his life, he knew exactly what he was doing. I didn't feel there was any, where in Opu and even in the two, the short film, there was that, and it's wonderful, that sense of experimentation going on. But that's what makes them so endearingly wonderful is that even his experimentation is, without him even realizing it, he's brilliant. Like that shot in the Opu trilogy when he's got the dragonfly on the branch that lands. You know what I mean? Yeah, and he can, one of my favorite things that seems to be a thumbprint on everything we've seen is it's not just that he doesn't need the dialogue or even want the dialogue, but he's very happy letting you feel something and just letting things sit for very, very, very long periods of time. And just let you sit in that. Yeah, there's no problem with it, yeah. Yeah, he wants you to just be there. And I love the little, the nuances of how just a glance means something or a touch of a hand means something. Or, and again, as I felt that every moment that Madadi McCurgy was on screen, she, like so far all of the female leads he's had, they are just so, the camera loves them. They're so, such beautiful women to look at and so expressive in their eyes. But the one thing for me that was missing was it, and again, it may be just lost on me, was I wanted a little bit more humanness. I felt there was, the one who had the most humanness to me was the husband. I had my most, and it may be because I was most empathetic towards him because I felt like he was the victim of all of this. The husband? But that's, yes, yeah. The husband of the, the owner of the writing, the thing? Correct, yeah, the Bhubati Dutta played by Shaleen McCurgy. I don't know if he was the victim. Yeah, but whatever. Well, he's the one who has the guy steal from him and then discovers that his wife is emotionally attached to his cousin in law. Because of neglect from him, though. Was it neglect? Yes, it was. It was? Yeah. It was neglect from him. It even says it in the synopsis. Yeah, that for me, he came across as someone who, I guess it was the- He was the one I was least attached to. Yeah, he for me, he didn't come across, obviously he was someone who was taking her for granted. But I felt like she too, I didn't see any, and it could be the point in the relationship. I didn't see anything in regard to an attempt on either one of their parts to try and connect with one another. I felt like she was just bored with being married to a successful guy and bored being wealthy and bored that she didn't have anything to talk to about with her husband and then- Well, I think she was upset that her husband wasn't noticing her at all. I think that's what it was. Like, and it's been, it was a while because they even talked about it at the beginning where she said, or he or she said that, are you lonely? And she says, I'm used to it. And so it had been a while. Well, that's loneliness, that's not neglect. He's even said in the thing that her rival is the paper. So that gets all of his attention, she gets none of it. And so that's gonna cause some neglect, yeah. I'm sorry, which, what's synopsis? The, oh, nevermind. I guess I read it into the synopsis. It's not in the synopsis. But I thought I read who shares love. I thought I read that it was because of the father, the husband's neglect, but that's what I think it is. Not that I'm saying she's right in it, but that's why she found somebody who actually paid attention to her and showed interest in her interests as opposed to just thinking about himself. And so, yeah, that's why she found him. But then obviously, I thought, now, I know, Amel, I know his name. Yeah, or Amal, yeah, I don't know how to pronounce his name. I thought his character was actually really, really interesting because you didn't know what they were gonna do, were they gonna run off together, were they gonna start a relationship, was he also going to betray his cousin like the other guy did, but then he felt really, really bad because he saw what was going on. And then he left, and then the husband realized after he saw her crying really emotionally in the bedroom that he was like, oh, I should probably pay attention to my wife. And so... Yeah, I didn't capture that as much as I felt. I felt it was a bit more complex than that. I didn't think it was as simplistic as he's just an uncaring husband who wasn't paying attention to his wife and got his comeuppance by reason of the fact that she just, you know, what is she supposed to do? I didn't care about her. I think he just didn't pay attention to her and wasn't putting her as a priority. He put his paper as a priority, not his wife. And so she felt neglected and she wanted to feel loved and that somebody was interested in her. And so that's... Yeah, one of my favorite things about it was the way it portrays, and this is a very real thing that I think is lost in a lot of society today is that intimacy between two people happens way before anything happens physically if you're talking about true intimacy. Because having sexual connection to somebody is not intimacy in and of itself. That doesn't mean you've been intimate. There's people who go out and have one night stands with people. You were never intimate with that person. You just went out and turned them into a sex object. The real intimacy and the kind of intimacy that's dangerous to other relationships where someone's married and they find themselves becoming emotionally intertwined with somebody. It's in conversation. And that to me was the point of real disconnect because the husband was absolutely interested in conversation. I felt that she was not interested in conversation with him. They just didn't have a lot in common. I don't know that either one of them really was seeking to try to... I agree with that, but okay, that's fine. We don't have to hard-run on that too much. No, no, no, no. That's just a character development thing either within the story or the script where I didn't think she either was trying to be conversant with him. And granted, maybe because she'd been ignored for a lot of years and so she was unhappy because she finally reached a point of like not giving him the story. Like why would I give you the story if I don't think you're gonna really care or pay attention? So I'm not negating the fact that there was neglect. I wish I had felt more of that humanness in these things we're talking about. Neglect, loneliness, being ignored. In Rai's capacity to tell us that as a director, I thought it was superlative. But as it came to the actors giving us an embodiment of an actual human being, it felt statue-esque. Sometimes, sometimes. I don't know if I agree with that, but that's fine. Yeah, the, I think actually in the beginning, when he shows that he's not really interested in conversation except for his own when his cousin was telling him, started to tell him the story, and he just told him the title and then he just went on his ride. He's like, that doesn't make any sense. Okay, you need to get married. He didn't even listen to his story. He's not interested in anything except for what he has to say. That's what I got out of it. And until the end, and then he realizes it and hopefully he became a better person and a better husband for it and started focusing on his wife instead of just his paper. And so that's what I got out of it. But I thought my favorite character was probably, and now I thought he did the best of them all, but I guess we've seen him before, right? He was in a poo, right? That's all poo. Yeah, that's all poo. Yeah, that's all poo. And we've also seen him in, if I'm not mistaken, the very first time we actually saw him. It was in the short film, right? Yeah, Symmetra Trottergy was in that short film where the guys disappear and become dolls. That's too joyous. That's his short film, yeah. Yes. Yeah, that's his. So yeah, I think he's a really good actor. He was probably my favorite actor in this. And I thought it was really interesting that 90% of the film took place in just the house. That's just the house. It could be a play. Which was crazy. So I thought that was really interesting. And I enjoyed it. I still, I probably would prefer to watch opu even though I hated opu in terms of him himself. Yeah, I much prefer the opu trilogy. But I thought it was actually really enjoyable and I actually lived the score as well in the fact that he did the score. And I thought it sounded a little familiar at times, whatever it is, the piccolo or the flute that he uses, whatever, I can't recreate it. Yeah. But I really like that sound. Like a lot. I do too. It's definitively now stapled. There's a feeling, even though like he did this versus before it was Ravi Shankarp with the opu trilogy, there was still, there was still that, it almost felt like, you know, it has a feeling. That's the one of the first things I was, I was watching this with Indrani. I had my phone and she was watching it with me. And I said, I can't think of another director who puts you in their films and you can see a film and go, oh, that looks like a Tarantino film. That looks like a Sanjay Leela Bansali film. That looks like a film on the blank. There's not a lot of movies where there's not much going on on screen and you feel like you're in their film. And I feel that way with Satyajit Rai. I can feel myself in his films. He's a really talented director, man. He's a very, very good director. Understatement, well, happy birthday to you, sir. You are a genius and apparently also in scoring as well. You're multi-talented. Yeah, amazing, amazing, amazing filmmaker. Let us know what you got to be down in the comments below. Let us know what other Bengali and or Satyajit Rai films that we should watch next, please. Cause, you know, we explore everything. We wanna see them all? Yeah. Let us know down below. Our stupid reactions, tune in for the...