 Seen this film called “CHARULATA” (The Lonely Wife)? I think a good majority of the readers are going “CHARULATA what?” It is a cinematic version of a short story by Rabindranath Tagore crafted by the inimitable Satyajit Ray. The film is set in Calcutta in the late nineteenth century when Bengal Renaissance was at its peak and India was under the British rule. The film revolves around Charulata / Charu, the childless, intelligent and beautiful wife of Bhupati, who edits and publishes a political newspaper called “The Sentinel”.
He is persuaded that his wife Charulata has special gifts as a writer and when his young cousin (the relationship is considered to be equivalent to Charu's brother-in-law) Amal, comes to live with them, Bhupati asks him to encourage her cultural interests as he personally is unable to devote any time to her. An intimate relationship develops betweenCharulata and Amal: one based on complicity, friendship, writing, and eventually love. But the masterstroke is Ray’s handling the opening shot – frame opens on a Charulata sewing a handkerchief for her husband and the SFX that accompanies the shot is a grandfather clock announcing 4pm with four heavy gongs…. hearing which Charu orders the servant to serve tea to her husband – the ever-so-busy Bhupati.
  After voicing the order, Charu goes on a trip across the palatial rooms in her house. Armed with her opera glasses (a symbol of Charu’s distant relationship with the world she lives in) she sees the road outside from the windows, which brings her to the door of the room. At this point Charu sees her husband, engrossed in a book, coming upstairs. Charu stands still and waits to see whether Bhupati is aware of her presence. As expected, she finds that Bhupati is too much absorbed in the book and passes her without even a glance. Charu is seen following Bhupati, keeping a little distance. As the camera pans with the characters walking on a sweeping balcony, we see them crossing a grandfather clock. The time according to the clock at that very moment is 7 minutes past 4. Now if you go back to the beginning of the film which starts with 4 loud gongs, and calculate the time till the characters pass the clock, you’ll find that exactly 7 minutes have passed! It’s simply awe-inspiring! I especially love these kind of movies ….Wherein things are captured in real time!
 When it comes to action dramas, real time is a great way to convey the urgency of the situation. Where some movies would jump ahead to the climax, a real-time drama lets things unfold naturally, making it feel more, well, real. It also draws the audience into the protagonist’s world, because he doesn’t do anything that we aren’t privy to.
So I’m delighted when a movie has a continuous 10-minute action scene, or a lengthy and heated debate between two characters. I love NBC’s 24, (if you haven’t seen it, go to any decent DVD Store and pick it up) They make some pretty egregious errors against real-time logic, like allowing Jack Bauer to drive anywhere in L.A. in no more than 10 minutes, but still. It’s a great concept. Episodes of TV shows as varied as ER and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have used the real-time format to great effect.
It works for comedy, too. Remember the great Chinese restaurant episode of Seinfeld? Twenty-two minutes of real-time nothingness. Seinfeld co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus went on to do a comedy called Watching Ellie, where every episode was 22 minutes of real time in the life of the main character. It was funny, but nobody watched it.
MY LIST OF THE 10 BEST REAL TIME MOVIES
- CHARULATA – The Lonely Wife (1964, Satyajit Ray). I’ve already talked about this at the beginning of this article.
- NICK OF TIME (1995, John Badham). Less successful was this suspense film, starring Johnny Depp as an average Joe whose daughter is kidnapped by Christopher Walken. Paramount used its real-time storytelling device as a marketing gimmick but audiences declined.
- ROPE (1948, Alfred Hitchcock). Another film more famous for its gimmick than for its content, Hitchcock's experiment with real time is better remembered for the director's idea to shoot it nominally in one continuous take (but actually more like eight, including hard cuts for reel changes).
- WHAT HAPPENED WAS... (1994, Tom Noonan). A spin on the real time mini-genre was cooked up by filmmaker/actor Noonan, who made a droll little urban comedy about two co-workers who decided to go out on a date. The camera never strays from the star-crossed couple as they struggle through their often painfully uncomfortable evening together.
- CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962, Agnes Varda). This French drama follows two hours (90 minutes, actually) in the life of its eponymous heroine, a young singer who, fearing she may have cancer, walks around Paris, thinking about her life as she awaits her biopsy results.
- TWO GIRLS AND A GUY (1997, James Toback). Many of these "real time" movies take place in fast-paced New York City, so draw your own conclusions. Toback's stagy comedy-drama unfolds in the apartment of a two-timing lout (Robert Downey Jr.) whose girlfriends show up at his door at the same time, hungry for revenge.
- FAIL-SAFE (1964, Sidney Lumet). Overshadowed by the movie that spoofed it, Dr. Strangelove, this film would have been even more forgotten had it not been for George Clooney's 2000 TV update, which was broadcast on national television not only in real time, but live and in black and white. Can't beat Henry Fonda as this film's president, though.
- 88 MINUTES (2007, Jon Avnet). A thriller about a college professor who, while moonlighting as a forensic psychiatrist for the FBI, receives a death threat telling him that he has only 88 minutes to live. In narrowing down possible suspects, he frantically seeks to communicate with a problem student, an ex-girlfriend, and a serial killer on death row.
- TIMECODE (2000, Mike Figgis). One-upping - or, rather, four-upping Hitchcock's Rope experiment, Figgis took advantage of digital technology and its ability to record over 90 minutes of unbroken footage by dividing his screen into four quadrants, with four different cameras following some sleazy Hollywood characters simultaneously, with no edits. A triumph of form despite a silly story.
- THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 (2009, Tony Scott). Armed men hijack a New York City subway train, holding the passengers hostage in return for a ransom, and turning an ordinary day's work for dispatcher Walter Garber into a face-off with the mastermind behind the crime.
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