Next up at a big tie at #169 on our Great Movies list, we get to this movie from Satyajit Ray. So this is not a neorealist movie set in a poor village; our protagonists are rich people, and they are going to have rich people relationship problems.

The titular Charulata is a bored housewife. Her husband is wealthy and is running a hobby newspaper — it’s an extremely political newspaper, and he clearly believes strongly in its mission, but it’s definitely one of those “make a small fortune” endeavors, not one that he really expects to be traditionally successful.

And so now family comes into the picture in two ways: One is that Charulata’s brother is apparently not doing so well (from context he seems to be something of a ne’er-do-well of long-standing); her husband offers him a job to come work on the paper. The other is that the husband’s cousin just graduated college and is coming to live with them while he gets his feet under himself.

The core of the movie is about a budding relationship between the cousin and Charulata. He’s young and feckless, but also funny and charming and — importantly — literary, in a way that appeals to Charulata. (Her husband is one of those extremely practical guys who has no use for literature and views it as a feminine eccentricity of hers to be humored; he’s nice about it, but in a condescending way.)

Spoilers

And so he keeps her company throughout her bored days, and when he gets published in a literary journal, she also writes a piece for a competing journal and gets it published. There’s this whole thing where they have a relationship that isn’t really sexual, and tbh not even precisely romantic, and yet: It’s clearly a deep emotional relationship that the husband would feel betrayed by if he understood it.

And oh, btw, remember her ne’er-do-well brother? Well, after the husband has given him an important job, entrusting him with the newspaper’s finances purely out of his own sense of decency to family, that brother ends up betraying him and stealing a bunch of money. The husband is rich enough for this not to really be a money problem, but it really just guts him, the idea that you could fully trust someone — your own family! — and they could betray you like that.

And he gives a whole speech along these lines to his cousin, who is overcome by guilt. And so he does the decent thing and leaves, with plans to get engaged to this other woman he’d been set up with. Which would be the end of it, except his departure triggers Charulata to be upset and cry about it, which tips the husband off as to the dynamics he’d been missing, and now he’s got this quasi-betrayal to deal with too. He takes off in his carriage.

Will they reconcile, or is this a fatal blow to their relationship? Well, the movie suggests an ending, but very deliberately does not commit to it.

As movies about rich people with relationship problems go, this is a good one. The characters are well-acted, the emotions are subtle, and the conflicts make sense with who these people are and the situations in which they find themselves. It’s Indian instead of French, but it reminds me a lot of The Earrings of Madame de…, which is about to be a huge coincidence, considering what’s coming up next on this list.