One of Ray's finest works, Charulata is the film in which Satyajit Ray's sensitivity to the special problems of Indian women finds its most complete expression. Based on a story by Tagore, the film evokes late-nineteenth-century India with masterstrokes of atmosphere and characterization. As the bored and lonely wife of a busy political journalist, who is drawn to her husband's younger cousin with whom she shares an interest in literature, Madhabi Mukherjee gives one of those exquisite, subtle, and ineffably graceful performances that one only finds in films by Renoir, Mizoguchi, Ophuls, or Ray. According to Molly Haskell, Ray “gets nearer to the heart of the ‘woman's dilemma' than films which see the problem in superficial terms of career possibilities. In so doing, he has made a film that is extraordinarily contemporary - to such an extent that if it were not for constant references to the Gladstone-Disraeli debates that so preoccupy Charulata's husband, we would forget we were in the nineteenth century.” Writing in The New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt observed: “The film leaves one with a sense of great things unfulfilled but never of mania.... Charulata is gentle to loneliness in the well-off, it is beautifully written, and sometimes it is very funny.”