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I saw two wonderful films last week, one an old classic which I was revisiting after very many years, the other a brand new film, not yet released in India.

Charulata, shown as part of the Kala Ghoda Festival, is one of Satyajit Ray’s best films. (Some accounts say it was one of his personal favourites). Its wonderful evocation of a rich Bengali household is the backdrop for a most unusual love story, a love unrequited for the simple reason that feelings are neither acknowledged nor stated. And, even more important, one of the protagonists isn’t even aware that he is an object of affection!

So many years after its release, it’s hardly a secret that Ray’s special relationship with the heroine of Charulata, Madhabi Mukerjee, started during the making of the film. The camera is certainly in love with Mukerjee and the actresses’ expressive beauty lights up the whole film, conveying first the suffocating boredom of a rich housewife’s uneventful life. And, later, the potentially explosive situation as her playful fondness for her brother-in-law (a very young Soumitra Chatterjee) begins to turn into something deeper. Charulata’s subtlety, its sensitive handling of a delicate subject and its understated play of emotions make it a masterpiece.

The new film I saw at a preview was Capote, based on an episode in the life of the American writer Truman Capote. The film is up for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director (Bennett Miller), Best Actor (Philip Saymour Hoffman) and Best Supporting Actress (Catherine Keener).

By 1959, Truman Capote was an established literary name in America, Breakfast at Tiffany’s having already captured the imagination of its reading public. (It was later made into a highly successful film with the luminous Audrey Hepburn and a title song, Moon River, which went on to become a classic. Apparently, Capote was disappointed with the film. He was a fan of Hepburn but felt she was wrong for the role. He wanted Marilyn Monroe!)

In November of that year, Capote read a news item in the New York Times about the Clutter murders. All four members of a well-to-do family in rural Kansas (father, mother, son, daughter) were murdered in their beds, all bound and gagged before being shot, the father, in addition, having his throat slit. The brutality of the crime, and its seeming lack of motive had shaken up the rural community. Capote thought it would make a powerful article for the New Yorker. Later, he decided to expand it into a book.

In Cold Blood introduced a new literary genre, one Capote described as the Non-fiction novel. Capote the film, tells the story of the six years that the writer took to write In Cold Blood. More than that, it recreates a character as marvellously as any film I have seen.

Truman Capote was certainly a character: short, but larger than life; a writer of prose that was delicate and sensitive, a conversationalist, who was crude and overbearing. He was open about his homosexuality at a time when everyone kept it under covers, and open about his innermost feelings, which he used blatantly to draw other people out. You see that in Capote: he shamelessly tells lachrymose stories about his mother’s death to gain the confidence of one of the murderers. Yet he doesn't seem to know that he is being manipulative. This wonderfully complex evocation of character is built upon a marvellous performance from Phillip Saymour Hoffman.

See the film quickly because it’s what marketing people call a “niche product” and won’t run too long. And while I watched it, I knew why: I became aware of my own restlessness, and the restlessness of the small audience around me. We were totally engrossed in the film, but we wanted it to move on. It was the same in Charulata: here at the Goethe Institute screening, the audience was, I suppose, “committed”, yet there was shuffling in the seats, and a few people left early. I even found myself becoming impatient with Ray's leisurely pace.

Yet, years ago, when I first saw Charualata, there was no such uneasiness, and if Capote had been screened in the sixties and the seventies, no one would have asked for faster-paced action. In this quarter century or so the world has changed, and in this quarter century or so, we have changed too. Our attention spans have got shorter; our fingers are constantly on the Fast Forward button. We prefer One Day Internationals to five day Tests, short concerts to all-night ones, the quick read to a gradually unwinding book. We are too taken up with our everyday concerns to notice, but it’s an irretrievable loss.

When you see Charulata and Capote you will know how very deep that loss is.