An Anguish at Arm’s Length: Supriya Choudhury in The Cloud-Capped Star

Whenever I think of the iconic Bengali actor Supriya Choudhury, the first thing I recall is not her face—with its high cheekbones and large, kohl-rimmed eyes that often drew comparisons to Sophia Loren’s—but her voice, disembodied, tearing through the hills in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star (1960): “Brother, I wanted to live; I want to live; tell me that I will live!” A beloved star of her time, Choudhury had a decades-spanning oeuvre that included another Ghatak film, E-Flat (1961); a string of commercial successes with her real-life partner, the Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar; and even a notable late-career cameo in Mira Nair’s The Namesake (2006). But when she passed away in 2018 at the age of eighty-five, she seemed forever embalmed—in obituaries, remembrances, and cultural memory—in that primal scream she lets loose in The Cloud-Capped Star as Neeta, the dutiful daughter of a penurious refugee family who is ruined by her own selflessness.

It’s a cry that endures in part because it strains against an inexorable fate. In The Cloud-Capped Star, Ghatak draws from the myths of the Hindu deity Durga to deliver a furious critique of the bourgeois values of post-Partition Bengal. Like the Mother Goddess whose deconsecration—ritualized through the yearly festival of Durga Puja—sustains the life force of the world, Neeta expends herself thanklessly for her family until tuberculosis seals her tragic destiny. She ends up at a hillside sanatorium (a twisted reference to the goddess’s mountainous abode), where, in the film’s final moments, she is visited by her brother Shankar (Anil Chatterjee). As he prattles nervously about their nephew, trying to keep her in good spirits, Neeta suddenly erupts, objecting desperately to the inevitable. She isn’t dead yet, but Ghatak all but confirms her annihilation with Eisensteinian montage: he cuts jaggedly between angles, destroying all sense of perspective, while Neeta’s voice seems to separate from her body and reverberate across the valleys, which are filmed in rapid pans that fade into each other.

That Choudhury’s distinctive presence survives this scene of destruction, enduring and perhaps even engulfing Ghatak’s formal frenzy, is a testament to the actress’s astute melodramatic capacities—her ability to turn her character’s abject victimhood into an unsettling moral force. It was Ghatak’s inspired use of “lower” forms like melodrama that distinguished his work from the neorealism of Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, his contemporaries in the Indian art cinema of the 1950s and 60s, also known as “parallel cinema.” “I think a truly national cinema will emerge from the much-abused form of melodrama when truly serious and considerate artists will bring the pressure of their entire intellect upon it,” Ghatak once wrote. This was precisely his project in works like The Cloud-Capped Star, Subarnarekha (1965), and A River Called Titas (1973). These transfixing, sometimes erratic films harness melodramatic excess in service of a radical indictment of liberal-capitalist society, deploying Indian mythology alongside Jungian archetypes and Brechtian alienation. Neeta in The Cloud-Capped Star represents a particularly ambitious effort at this synthesis: she invokes not just multiple avatars and symbols of the Goddess Durga, but also the Jungian mother-complex, the exploited proletariat, the soul of the partitioned nation, and, at the most immediate level, the figure of the refugee.

It’s a crowded, overdetermined canvas within which to act, enclosed further by Ghatak’s expressionist tendencies to externalize the psychic worlds of the characters in the soundtrack and the mise-en-scène. Where, one might wonder, is the room for performance? Choudhury, in her midtwenties at the time and with a couple commercial hits under her belt, could have responded with an emotional realism drawn from her lived experiences. The setting and the themes of the film were certainly familiar to her. She’d herself been a refugee as a child, fleeing Myanmar for Calcutta on foot in the midst of World War II; like Neeta, she too had begun working at a young age. Instead, Choudhury holds her own against Ghatak’s tortured, stylized ironies with a performance that balances anguish with an unnerving estrangement. Even as the pathos of her heroine consumes the film, Choudhury’s calibrated turn—at times excessive, at times jarringly effaced—keeps the viewer at an analytical distance.

In the first half of the film, as we’re introduced to Neeta’s family, Choudhury exudes an almost cloying goodness. An industrious college student, she moves through the squalid refugee colony with a benevolent sense of calm, in contrast to the flighty, discontented characters who surround her: her nagging mother and comically pompous father, who bemoan their demotion from a middle-class lifestyle; Shankar, the singer-in-training, always rapt in his fantasies of impoverished artistry; Geeta, the exaggeratedly superficial sister; and Montu, the younger brother who dreams of being a sportsman. They ply her with wants and demands—for clothes, books, food, bills, cash—so that the meager income she earns as a tutor is gone before she can buy herself a much-needed pair of sandals. But Neeta responds with endless generosity, often gazing soulfully into offscreen space, as if perceiving a higher dimension of reality invisible to the petty mortals around her. A beatific smile remains fixed on her face, troubled only occasionally by the jabs of her mother.

In these scenes, the “giving goddess” seems no longer an allegory but an embodiment in the figure of Neeta. Choudhury projects a mythic aura so hyperbolic that at moments it seems to rupture the narrative. This is particularly evident in an exchange between Neeta and her romantic interest, Sanat. Like everyone else around her, he takes advantage of her generosity even while protesting feebly against her exploitation. When she suggests that after they marry she can support his academic ambitions with her earnings, he balks at her: “You don’t deserve any of this,” he says, “this hardship, suffering, and responsibility!” Ghatak closes in on Neeta’s face in profile as she responds. Continuing to smile, she turns slowly to face the camera, eyes gazing into the distance, and says coyly, “Then make a glass case and place me inside like a wax doll.” Then she turns back to him and suggests they walk back home.

There’s a curious falseness to this moment. Neeta’s words suggest sarcasm, perhaps even resentment at Sanat’s empty pretense of chivalry. Yet Choudhury’s monotone delivery betrays no such sentiment, as if severed from the content of her speech. She seems to suggest that she’s already a wax doll in the invisible prison of the screen: fetishized and hallowed, yet, like an idol, deprived of real, fleshful life. It’s an obscene caricature of the trope of the self-sacrificial, divinely suffering woman, who in Indian melodrama routinely embodies an ideal, a focus of sympathy and identification. But Neeta’s lack of all comprehensible human emotion comes off as a disconcerting, unrealistic aberration (or perhaps a “sin,” as she later describes her own failure to protest the wrongs done to her). Choudhury commits so fully, so unreasonably, to the archetype that she undoes its spell.

From one extreme, Choudhury goes to the other. The turning point in The Cloud-Capped Star, initiating Neeta’s devolution, arrives when she discovers that Sanat has betrayed her. She visits him in his new apartment, where he admits to having quit his research against her wishes and taken up a job. As she sits in his living room, dazed, she hears the clink of bangles from his kitchen. Wordlessly, with a deep inhale, she arises from her seat, her gaze still vacant but no longer sweet, and walks out of the apartment. As she descends the stairs, the world of feeling that she has so far kept at bay seems to take hold of her like a spirit. The camera approaches her at a low angle; on the soundtrack, one can hear the lashes of a whip. With each step down, Choudhury’s wide-open eyes turn further upward, while her body convulses, as if experiencing a mild seizure. Finally, frozen in a close-up à la Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s Joan of Arc, she clutches her neck, her face the image of hysteria in arrest. If before she had seemed like a wax doll, she now becomes pure flame. An abstraction yet again—not a person.

That moment presages Neeta’s eventual death by consumption, that most melodramatic and tropic of illnesses. But in the few scenes before her fever begins, Neeta is extraordinarily brittle and alive, as if negotiating the brief gap that has opened up between her two states of abjection. She struggles to maintain her composure in the face of the revelation that Sanat is in fact marrying her sister, Geeta. It’s around Shankar that her unbalanced turmoil is most apparent. He announces that he’s leaving for Bombay in protest of the goings-on in their home; she responds by switching between grim stares and sudden, feigned bursts of cheer, asking him to teach her a song for Geeta’s wedding. Aghast at her continued self-debasement, Shankar exclaims, demonstrating the same empty indignance as Sanat earlier in the film, “It’s soft-hearted idiots like you who get hurt the worst.” In response, Neeta repeats her line from before, “Then make a glass case and place me inside like a wax doll.”

This time, however, Choudhury’s inflections couldn’t be more different. She snaps angrily at Shankar, her features bathed dramatically in shadows and moonlight, her eyes flashing and trembling. Emotion neither eludes nor exceeds her; instead, her fury is writ clearly on her face. That moment of perfectly pitched rage gives way to the euphony of sorrowful music, as the two siblings sing a Tagore song heavy with melancholy. The sequence ends with another repetition: Neeta’s face in close-up, as lashes are heard on the soundtrack. Again she looks to the heavens and clutches her neck. But now, for the first time in the film, she collapses into sobs. These are the few instances in the film when Choudhury’s performance suspends the veneer of alienation—when, breaking free of myth and trope, her feelings seem cut to the measure of human existence.

The gut-punch of her final scream comes from such moments of earthly suffering that Choudhury modulates with precision. By the end of The Cloud-Capped Star, Neeta is in the hills, which, earlier in the film, she dreams of visiting with Shankar once he becomes famous. (“And then, all my troubles will vanish,” she says naively.) It’s also the final destination of her mythical trajectory: one of the stories about Goddess Durga is that she was born out of a sacrificial fire, surrendering, as its smoke rises to the heavens, all mortal desires and aspirations. But having seen this arc to its very end, Neeta is gripped by the most basic human desire—to live. The promises of Brahminical tradition, the bourgeois family, and the modern nation have all proved hollow.

To some, that sudden reversion might seem contrived; Ghatak wrote that he had heard it described as “horribly forced.” But the filmmaker’s genius lay in this calculated dissonance. He invoked the cultural narratives that organize our lives only to make them strange, exposing their fundamental illogic. And in The Cloud-Capped Star, this method finds its muse in Choudhury. Straining within and against archetype, her performance opens up the chasm between human life and the idols and ideals foisted upon it by society. With her every gesture, she distils Ghatak’s complex political critiques into a simple, searing truth: this world is broken, and the only way to live is to rail against it.

An Anguish at Arm’s Length: Supriya Choudhury in The Cloud-Capped Star

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