Charulata 2011

Agnidev Chatterjee's second film Charuulata 2011 is inspired by Rabindranath Tagore's short story, Noshtonirth, earlier the source for the Satyajit Ray Classic. Significantly different, it veers away from the confines of the period drama, and sets it in time contemporary, with its inherent complexities and moral chaos. Tagore's late 19th and early 20the century ethos and Victorian morals are jettisoned for the turbulence of a society where ethics are going through swift and challenging transformation. Yet the fun damental structure of Tagore's classic narrative continues to present disturbing questions to the moral ambivalence facing the audience of today.

Chaiti, a lonely house wife ignored by an indifferent husband, discovers an alternative existence in the cyber world, whose secrecy allows her to relinquish her inhibitions on Facebook, where her alter ego Charuulata 2011 emerges as a distinctly different character. Her id now is her existence, her refuge from daily domestic melancholy. Her harmless scrapping on Facebook turns into a passionate one night stand that soon metamorphoses into a secret affair that threatens to destroy her marriage, and her comfortable existence. The film examines the institution of marriage, and conducts a ruthless postmortem of infidelity.