DivX Clásico

(aka 'Meghe Dhaka Tara" or "The Cloud-capped Star")

directed by Ritwik Ghatak
India 1960

Ritwak Ghatak is generally regarded as one of the big three of the Indian New Wave (and Indian cinema at large), along with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, the latter whom is he’s perhaps closest aligned with given shared political leanings, an artful talent for incisive social commentary, and most of all, for auteurist experimentality. With The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), Ghatak took the melodrama genre along with its coherent, causally driven plot structures and relegated it as the backdrop of something much further removed from the conventional. Throughout, the personal is harmonized with the socio-historical condition, and this duality is a key component of the film’s accomplishments.



Situated in Calcutta, a straight-forward plot presents Neeta as a middle-class daughter encumbered by increasing demands to support her self-centered family members. She augments the income gained by her elderly father, while she moves toward the final year of her education. Her struggles are made bearable by hope, primarily founded on two loved ones—her brother Shankar, who admittedly takes advantage while waiting for his singing career to blossom, and her fiancé, Sanat, who pursues his Ph.D. as part of a promising future.



While there is immediacy in an unfolding plot of multi-dimensional characters, the story is as much elsewhere, in an allegory of post-partition India. Ghatak manages to take the “plastic material” of objects and people and charge them relationally by creating forceful situational congruencies. In this way a letter may later become a cloth and then a letter again, a sister may become some other neighborhood girl, a picture, often glimpsed, becomes a nostalgic index of childhood within which the pictured hills are hope itself, and all the while, an occasional passing train gathers voice with its conspicuous and emblematic passings, first harmonizing with a brothers singing, and then rising shrilly to disrupt conversation. And when the train is not passing, there’s the evidence—tracks, stations, and faint traces of its sound in a carefully constructed and manipulated soundscape.



One last, spoiler-free, example may best exemplify the multi-level magic that Ghatak is able to muster. Soon after introducing Neeta, and incidentally her sandal that’s in need of mending, there is a shot transition to her house before she’s arrived where her father is discussing some dark-skinned neighborhood girl, this girl will appear in passing much later and exchange brief words with Neeta, after which the camera stays with her, not Neeta for an intriguing, introspective interval, and then later on and in passing, this small girl gets mistaken by Sanat as his sister whom he asks for money before realizing his “error,” and then, finally, when he doesn’t mistake her, and she pauses, recognizing him, and adjusts her sandal strap that just came loose, and then walks awkwardly down the path that Neeta did at the film’s beginning. There are many examples of inversions and mappings that take place and lend a resonating quality to this remarkable film. The Cloud-Capped Star is a master work that invites subsequent viewings and vital contemplation.

Meghe Dhaka Tara CD 1 (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960).avi

Meghe Dhaka Tara CD 1 (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960).srt

Meghe Dhaka Tara CD 2 (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960).avi

Meghe Dhaka Tara CD 2 (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960).srt