The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) is a 1960 film from India (specifically Bengal), directed by Ritwik Ghatak.
A family lives on the grounds of a school somewhere in the suburbs of Kolkata. They are refugees from East Bengal, which after the 1947 Partition of India became the Muslim province of East Pakistan (and is now Bangladesh). Once solidly middle-class (father Taran was an academic), they are now desperately poor.
In fact, the entire family now relies on older daughter Neeta, who is making a meager living by tutoring. Eldest son Shankar has dedicated himself to music, with ambitions of becoming a singer, and he practices singing nonstop rather than get a job. Younger brother Mantu and younger sister Geeta seem content to merely loaf. Neeta's unnamed mother, who has been warped by a decade of bitter poverty, is desperate to hold on to Neeta's income. Neeta for her part acquiesces in her own victimization, allowing her family to exploit her, sacrificing her every chance at happiness.
Tropes:
- All Take and No Give: Most of Neeta's family, who take and take and take from her and never give back, at least not until the end, when Shankar does too late.
- Answer Cut: Having decided that she can't get married to Sanat yet because she has to support her family, Neeta says of Sanat that "He'll wait for me. I have no fear of that."
- Call-Back: Early in the film, Shankar sees Neeta reading a love letter from Sanat and snatches it away from her, teasing "Love letters, at your advanced age?". Towards the end Shankar comes home after having hit it big, finds Neeta clutching something again, and tears it away from her, saying the exact same thing. Only this time it isn't a love letter she's holding, it's the rag she's been clutching to her mouth to catch the blood she's coughing up, as she suffers from advanced tuberculosis.
- The Cavalry Arrives Late: In a sense. Surprisingly, Shankar actually does hit it big as a singer, getting airplay on the radio and getting famous enough that people ask him for autographs. He comes back home in triumph, ready to lift his family out of poverty. But it's too late for Neeta, who has literally sacrificed her life for the others and is now dying of TB.
- Downer Ending: While her grasping, selfish family members have all gotten Happy Endings for themselves, Neeta is left alone at a sanatorium, dying of tuberculosis, bitter at herself and her family for sacrificing her life. Her last line of dialogue is her screaming at Shankar, "I WANT TO LIVE!".
- Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: The hard times have already been going for quite a while at the start of the film. But when dire necessity forces Neeta to abandon her university studies and take a job in a factory, her father the academic is displeased, and acutely feels the familiy's loss of status.
- Gratuitous English: It's not actually spelled out, but apparently Taran was a teacher of some kind back in the day and is given to quoting Yeats and Keats and sprinkling English bits in his conversation. In one scene Neeta invites Sanat in English to "Please sit down," and when he doesn't understand, she says she's trying to use more English like her dad.
- Hypocrite: Shankar calls his sister an idiot for slaving away for the family, even while he mooches off of her rather than getting a job.
- Incurable Cough of Death: It actually doesn't start off as a cough, but when Neeta says she won't be going to the library because "I have a fever," it isn't hard to guess what will happen. Pretty soon she's coughing, and sure enough, she's diagnosed with TB.
- It's All About Me: Most of Neeta's family, who are all too willing to sponge off of her. Worst of all is Neeta's nagging shrew of a mother, who demands Neeta hand over all of the pittance she makes. When Mom becomes alerted to the fact that Neeta is in love with Sanat, she intentionally steers lovely Geeta to Sanat in order to break up Neeta's romance, because Mom fears losing Neeta's salary. At the end Mom can barely be bothered to feign concern over her eldest daughter being terminally ill, because Mom is too excited about using Shankar's money to tear down their shack and build a nicer house.
- J'accuse!: When a shocked Shankar reveals to the family that Neeta has advanced tuberculosis, her father—the one person in the family who's at least had the grace to feel guilty about poor Neeta's dreams being crushed while everyone else sponges off of her—points at the others and dramatically says "I ACCUSE!". Then he sighs, gives up, and goes back to bed.
- Literary Allusion Title: It's an allusion to The Tempest, and specifically to the famous "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" soliloquy, where Prospero speaks of "the cloud-capp'd towers" of his dream island.
- Love Martyr: A platonic example. Neeta selflessly gives and gives and gives for her family. She buys razors and tobacco for her family on her pathetic salary while she walks around in broken shoes. She's the only one who works while Shankar does his endless voice training and their younger siblings simply sit around. She loses her boyfriend to Geeta, then accedes to her mother's demand to surrender her jewelry to Geeta for Geeta's wedding. She abandons her pursuit of an M.A. degree to take a factory job after her father suffers a fall and can't work at all anymore. She keeps working until she is too physically ill with tuberculosis to leave the house. At the end a bitter Neeta tells Shankar that she blames herself for giving in.
- No Name Given: The grasping, selfish mother is never named.
- Sibling Triangle: Neeta's own mother pushes the other daughter, Geeta, at Sanat with the express intent of breaking up Neeta and Sanat's romance. It works.
- Title Drop: In the love letter that Neeta reads at the beginning of the film, Sanat calls her "a cloud-capped star." There's also a Call-Back at the end, when a bitter, disillusioned Neeta pulls that letter out, reads that turn of phrase again, and wonders why she kept it.
- Tragic Dropout: One stop in Neeta's parade of tragic disappointments comes when she gives up on her pursuit of an M.A. degree, taking a factory job instead because the rest of her family needs the money.
