The 1947 partition of India and subsequent refugee crisis often figure into Ritwik Ghatak’s deeply felt films. The Cloud-Capped Star, his 1960 masterpiece, powerfully conveys the despair of being in a constant state of impermanence. In plumbing the inner worlds of characters living on the fringes of society and enduring myriad injustices, the Bengali filmmaker taps into something at once strange and stirring through his singular, melodramatic fusion of offbeat humor, off-kilter framing, and editing rhythms, as well as though an experimental use of sound and music that’s alternately beautiful and jarring in its disorienting effects.
In The Cloud-Capped Star, Neeta (Supriya Choudhury), a college student who helps support her family with her meager earnings as a part-time tutor, embodies the tensions between hopelessness and aspiration that pervade the refugee camp where she lives. The driving force of the story is her desire to transcend her impoverished surroundings, and to not give into the pressures of her increasingly demanding, often selfish family. A love letter from a fellow refugee, Sanat (Niranjan Ray), describes Neeta as “a cloud-capped star veiled by circumstance,” a metaphor which captures not only the feelings of helplessness brought on by poverty, but the sense that the light of Neeta’s intelligence and ambition is being dimmed by the destructiveness of her environment.
Ghatak opens the film on a lightly comic note as he introduces the members of Neeta’s family: her narcissistic, flirtatious younger sister, Geeta (Gita Ghatak); sports-obsessed younger brother, Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal); intellectual but ineffectual father (Gyanesh Mukherjee); and browbeating mother (Gita Dey). Though each in their own way has begun to exploit Neeta for money, these early interactions exude a certain playfulness, filtered as they are through the lens of a young girl’s eagerness to please at a time when her future still seems bright.
Social norms dictate that such heavy familial responsibilities should fall to her older brother, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee), but his time is spent rehearsing his singing rather than looking for a job, something he believes is “unseemly for an artist.” While Neeta willingly helps out her entire family, it’s in Shankar whom she truly places her hope and faith, believing so strongly in his talent that she wants all of his focus to remain on his training. Numerous musical interludes of Shankar practicing his singing and sitar-playing are overpowering in their beauty, and Ghatak’s decision to record the character’s vocals with an amplifying echo imparts an otherworldliness to the film. Shankar’s sublime music offers him and his sister, and by extension the audience, a respite from so much suffering, if only for a spell.
These songs give a clear sense of why Neeta would forgo so much to help Shankar succeed, but her endless self-sacrifice eventually comes at a cost. When Neeta’s father is seriously injured in a fall and can no longer work, Neeta is unwittingly forced into the role of sole breadwinner for her family, leaving her with no choice but to drop out of college. There’s a biting irony to the way Neeta’s aspirations are crushed under the weight of her obligations, while all the while her siblings’ circumstances slowly and steadily improve. But despite the callousness of Neeta’s family, Ghatak renders each of them with an empathy that accounts for their own strife, as well as their guilt over needing to rely on Neeta.
Late in the film, Neeta’s mother says that “the weight of poverty has crushed her soul,” and while one can sense her underlying regret in driving Neeta into virtual servitude, it’s also clear that she had no other choice aside from letting her family starve. For Ghatak, generosity and kindness are unsustainable in conditions of poverty, as the scarcity of resources transforms victims into victimizers, and destroys those who refuse to prey on others. It’s a tough lesson for Neeta to learn, and one that breaks her once-boundless compassion as her loved ones’ self-preservation instincts spring forth vampiric fangs that ultimately suck her dry.
Neeta’s suffering, however tragic it may be throughout the film, is an object of strange, unnerving beauty for Ghatak. The filmmaker uses dense soundscapes to amplify her sense of disconnection and disorientation and striking compositions to encapsulate the epic scale of her downfall. In the scene where she learns that Geeta has made romantic moves on Sanat and snapped him up for herself, Ghatak pushes the camera in on a coyly smiling Geeta, before then sliding it over to the heartbroken Neeta, framing her in close-up, with a raging fire outside filling the right side of the frame. Other shots, such as a duet between Neeta and Shankar before he leaves to make it big, frame her in extreme low-angle shots or in close-up from only the eyes up, intensifying her anguish by almost distorting her facial features.
But it’s in the final sequence, when Shankar visits Neeta as she’s recovering in a remote hillside, where Ghatak’s aural and visual strategies combine in the most spectacular of fashions. As Shankar tells her of their family’s reversal of fortune, Neeta says, “I wanted to live! I want to live!” And as the camera spins around and captures the nearby hillside, her voice reverberates throughout her surroundings, it’s as if the landscape were absorbing and projecting her pain and sorrow. It’s a harrowing moment of despair, an expressionistic protest against the dehumanization of poverty that Ghatak elevates to the level of myth.
Image/Sound
Criterion’s transfer of a new 2K digital restoration is impressive, boasting an extremely detailed picture. Which is to say, it’s a quantum leap forward from BFI’s 2002 DVD release, the only physical media release of The Cloud-Capped Star until now. The contrast on this release is particularly of note, especially in the film’s latter half, where characters become increasingly shrouded in deep, inky black shadows or bathed in pools of light. The image is consistently sharp and almost completely free of damage and debris, lending a newfound depth and clarity to the film’s impoverished settings and its vividly drawn characters. But as fantastic as the new restoration looks, it’s the uncompressed monaural soundtrack that really steals the show, bringing Ghatak’s unique melding of classical Indian songs, heightened sounds of nature, and strange, ambient non-diegetic sounds to life through a dense, richly varied mix.
Extras
The sole extra here is a 30-minute conversation between filmmakers Saeed Akhtar Mirza and Kumar Shahani in which the two men, both students of Ghatak’s, speak of their mentor’s depictions of the rootlessness of refugees following the 1947 partition of India and his unique flair for melodrama. They also recount stories of Ghatak’s teaching days, when he was often drunk and depressed, yet still able to pass on his cinematic knowledge and humanistic outlook on life. The disc also comes with a foldout booklet with an essay by film scholar Ira Bhaskar, who provides an abundance of cultural context for the film’s narrative and ties Ghatak’s use of Indian mythology to his embracing of traditional melodrama.
Overall
Criterion’s wonderful audio-visual presentation of Ritwik Ghatak’s masterpiece more than makes up for this release’s dearth of extras.
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