Basing his film on a story by Rabindranath Tagore called “The Broken Nest,” Ray’s meticulously rendered adaptation takes place in a Bengal of 1879 with the woman of the title married to the publisher of a political, English-language newspaper. In the miraculous first scene, Ray wordlessly describes Charu’s wealth and comfort as well as her constriction, boredom and loneliness. She is intelligent, creative and playful, yet emotionally distanced from a loving but work-obsessed husband whom she married as a child. This scene also points to the disregarded female “gaze” that Charu reclaims while remaining blind to its transformative powers. She is caught unaware by the arrival of Amal, her literary, playful cousin-in-law, whose carefree camaraderie elicits an earth-shattering awakening. Ray adds subtle political points in his embroidery of a rich psycho-sociological landscape in which the motives of each of the players—including Charu’s duplicitous brother and his “traditional,” uneducated wife—contribute to the nest’s disassembly. As lines are crossed and walls come down, the remarkable melody of this caged bird’s song comes as a shock to the men who unwittingly fostered its birth.

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