Wes Anderson has once again put Satyajit Ray at the centre of his cinematic influences, naming Charulata among his favourite films for a road trip and admitting that he borrowed its famous binocular imagery for Moonrise Kingdom.
Anderson made the remarks in a recent episode of the Criterion Collection’s Mobile Closet Picks! series. The filmmaker was asked to recommend films from the Criterion Collection for fellow cinephiles.
Anderson said he already has his own Criterion Closet at home. But while preparing for a family road trip across the US, he visited the mobile version of the collection to pick films for the journey.
Among his selections was a physical copy of Ray’s Charulata, also known as The Lonely Wife. Anderson called it one of Ray’s best films and spoke openly about the Indian master’s influence on his own work.
“I stole many things for my own movies from Ray, and from this one (Charulata) — the protagonist spends much of her time looking out from the rooms in her house, with binoculars. And for my film Moonrise Kingdom, we have got a lot of binocular shots — only because of Satyajit Ray, one of my favourite great masters of cinema,” he said.
Anderson’s other picks included Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait and Design for Living, Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, John Ford’s Stagecoach and Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow.
This is not the first time Anderson has spoken about Ray’s influence. In earlier interviews, he admitted that he lifted a memory game scene “wholesale” from Ray’s 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri for his 2023 film Asteroid City.
A longtime admirer of Ray, Anderson also dedicated The Darjeeling Limited to the Indian master. He has repeatedly used music from Ray’s films in his own work and described his borrowing from the filmmaker as a form of respectful homage.
The connection between Charulata and Moonrise Kingdom is also well established in discussions of Anderson’s work. Criterion’s own material on Moonrise Kingdom identifies the film as a 2012 Anderson production, while analysis of the two films has highlighted the shared use of binoculars as a visual motif.
