India

Knock Knock Knock (2019)

André Crous

Although occasionally unbalanced, the heart-warming, Darjeeling-set Knock Knock Knock mostly sustains our interest thanks to its two leading men.

Knock Knock KnockIndia
3.5*

Director:
Sudhanshu Saria
Screenwriter:
Sudhanshu Saria
Director of Photography:
Achyutanand Dwivedi

Running time: 38 minutes

Lines intersect in director Sudhanshu Saria’s first medium-length film, entitled Knock Knock Knock. But the patterns they form and the nature of their content aren’t always apparent. On the heels of his successful début feature, Loev, Saria has crafted another story focused almost solely on the interactions between two men. This time around, however, the contours are much hazier, and the film may well frustrate viewers looking for clear answers.

Their first meeting happens, seemingly by chance, in the opening scene. Sitting alone at a table on the balcony of a café (Keventer’s, whose breathtaking view was made for the big screen) in Darjeeling, a quiet, focused, middle-aged man (Santilal Mukherjee) is designing a crossword puzzle. We see him misspell the word “camouflage”. Maybe it’s because he is distracted by prying eyes at the next table: They belong to a lively young man, whose clothing is conspicuously similar in colour to his own. His name, at least according to the credits, is Keta (Phuden Sherpa). When he realises he’s been noticed, he comes over to start chatting. He says that he designs tattoos, never wears shoes (according to him, they trap his energy) and is 22 years old.  The older man, whom he affectionately calls “Dada” (father), is not that dissimilar after all: For the last 22 years, he has been coming here from Kolkata on vacation to design crosswords.

The meeting, which also involves some bizarre talk about parabolas, ends the way it began, with Dada looking over his shoulder at Keta. The scene’s perfect bookend structure makes us wonder whether the encounter may have been imagined, and it won’t be the last time.

The next day, Dada is jogging when Keta sneaks up behind him to join his knight-like moves through the rolling hills. But we quickly view him with some suspicion because, despite his proclamation to the contrary the day before, he is now wearing shoes. And yet, he is bubbling with spirit and spontaneity and projects a childlike curiosity that is completely irresistible.

Things start to unravel a bit with an extended dream/nightmare sequence that swings between serenity and sudden scares and leads into the least clearly defined part of the story, which is, unfortunately, also the final act. Regrettably, the plot doesn’t turn explicitly into a ghost story, which could have been fun, nor does it work to emphasise a spiritual connection between the two characters until the very last moment. 

When an uptight introvert meets an ebullient extrovert in a film, it is supposed to generate conflict, which gives dramatic energy to the narrative, but Knock Knock Knock has no conflict and, therefore, no real drama to speak of. The opening scene has a wonderful two-minute single take that starts to delve into the two characters a little bit, but some important information is delivered in a rush, almost as an aside, and no other scene elaborates on the details we get here.

For close to 40 minutes, Mukherjee manages to sustain our interest in Dada. By the end, however, we still know too little about him to care about this character, so when the climax comes, it falls flat. Keta, who always appears out of nowhere, is even more of a blank slate: He exists only in relation to Dada, and this relationship never becomes anything more than superficial.

Knock Knock Knock is clearly a personal film for the director (it’s his hands drawing the crossword puzzle in the opening shot). But given the ambiguity and lack of urgency, it does not hold the same emotional sway as Loev and never achieves the balance that its characters refer to. “Nothing is random, right? There’s a pattern in everything”, says Keta, but the pattern here can be hard to decipher. Never awkward enough to thrill us and never intimate enough to really make us care, the clues to this film, itself a kind of crossword puzzle, are too vague and leave us with a few rows unfilled.

There are some interesting ideas here, from the resemblance between a crossword puzzle and a chessboard to a climactic shot showing only one of the characters where we expect to see both. The key to unlocking the central mystery may very well lie in Dada misspelling “camouflage”, which is precisely where the narrative proper starts, but the viewer has to let her imagination do the work to fill in the blanks.

CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel (2018)

André Crous

In his epic documentary entitled CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur provides a comprehensive and sometimes mind-blowing overview of the Czechoslovak New Wave. 

CzechMateIndia
4*

Director:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Screenwriter:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Director of Photography:
David Čálek

Running time: 430 minutes

Without exception, an entire generation of Czech and Slovak filmmakers made their best films – and arguably some of the best their country ever produced – shortly after leaving film school. A perfectly balanced dose of freedom and oppression, along with powder kegs of talent, made these works possible. Unfortunately, half a century later, only a handful of them have received the recognition they deserve outside Central Europe. But now a new documentary clocking in at more than seven hours goes a long way towards remedying this oversight.

Almost every viewer interested in the history of cinema is aware of the French New Wave. Dating to the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the nouvelle vague basically comprised a handful of male film critics from the monthly Cahiers du cinéma journal who shared similar aesthetic sensibilities and looked up to many of the same filmmakers (“auteurs” like Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks and Robert Bresson). However, despite being even more ambitious in scope and more numerous and diverse in its composition, the Czechoslovak New Wave (Československá nová vlna) is much less known.

The movement’s best-known film is Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky), which was released at the end of 1966 and was then-28-year-old Jiří Menzel’s début feature. It was based on the eponymous novel by famed Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, which had been published the year before. The film was screened at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1968 – the first Czech film and only the second Czechoslovak film (after Ján Kadár’s Slovak-language The Shop on Main Street) to do so. This elegant depiction of a young station agent who loses his virginity during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia remains one of the defining films of the era.

And yet, it is but one in a panoply of cinematic masterpieces produced by Czech and Slovak filmmakers under extraordinary political circumstances in the 1960s. To better understand the time and the people involved and to inform the world of the magic that was conjured up between Prague and Bratislava in a very small window of time, Indian filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur travelled to the Czech Republic to interview Menzel. Along with Miloš Forman, he is perhaps the best-known Czech filmmaker outside his own country. What developed from their initial conversations over the course of seven years was the 430-minute CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel.

“Film is my job”, Menzel announces in the opening moments of this massive film. It is a seemingly unremarkable comment but perfectly encapsulates this man’s view of his place in history, and its implications vibrate throughout the rest of the film. He sees himself not only as being at the service of a customer but also as part of a greater network of individuals. Most importantly, in order to get his movies made, he saw (and still sees) compromise as part of the process. Others, most notably Miloš Forman, who had enjoyed wild success with Black Peter (Černý Petr), Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky) and The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko), chose to leave the country rather than work out a deal with totalitarians.

The morality of compromise is addressed most directly with the ambiguous case of legendary director and FAMU founder Otakar Vávra. Vávra was a chameleon able to adapt to the regime of the day and has been sharply criticised for his pro-communist films. And yet, many of his film school students subsequently went on to make anti-establishment films. Agnieszka Holland, who studied under him, says the dossier the secret police kept on her revealed how Vávra had falsely vouched for her belief in socialism, presumably in order to keep her from being kicked out of the school. Unfortunately, while writer-director Drahomíra Vihanová, who was banned from making features under communism, touches on Menzel’s apparent willingness to downplay the tragedy of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the film doesn’t push its professed subject on this point.

CzechMate focuses mostly on the 1960s but also spends a good chunk of time on the films the directors (especially Menzel) managed to make after 1968. It is at its best when it drills down into the historical context and the different ways in which political pressure affected or illuminated the character of the young filmmakers. Easily the most attention-grabbing part of the documentary is its account of the events between August 1968 (the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) and January 1969 (the funeral of Jan Palach, a student who had set himself alight in protest against the Soviet occupation). Director Ivan Passer’s description of how he and Miloš Forman escaped the country is also an unforgettable episode packed with adrenaline, incredible luck and white knuckles.

Emir Kusturica notes that Vávra once impressed on him the importance of having strong conflict in a film, as no one could keep still for two or three hours without it. In a surprising self-own on the part of Dungarpur, whose film contains no conflict whatsoever, Kusturica makes this statement around the three-hour mark. Menzel’s incredulousness at what the documentary will ultimately look like also provides some occasional levity, and more than five hours into the running time, he quips: “It will be long, long, long, long film!” Fortunately, the length is mitigated in no small measure by the absolutely stunning imagery from the directors’ films, with almost all of the clips appearing to have been restored to mint condition. 

Jiří Menzel, in his late-70s, cuts a congenial figure who can seemingly talk for hours on end without much prodding. With a lifetime of experience in the director’s chair and counting many of the best-known directors of the time among his friends, he is a font of knowledge about the New Wave. His infatuation with the female body, although infinitely less nuanced than the work of François Truffaut, is also emphasised on multiple occasions and gives a childlike quality to this director, not unlike that of his main character in Closely Watched Trains. However, quirky as he is, there are simply too many scenes with him speaking while lying in an empty bathtub, his dirty feet sticking out at the bottom, and this becomes a distraction in the latter part of the film.

He may well be the most talkative, but it is wholly unclear why Menzel should be the focus of attention and what the “search” in the title refers to. While Dungarpur provides a multifaceted view of Czech and Slovak filmmaking in the 1960s and beyond, thanks in large part to Menzel’s willingness to discuss it at great length, the latter is never challenged in any serious way. The last hour or two of the film does make clear that he is not universally beloved, but the director is not directly confronted with the criticisms his peers have of him and his work.

This brings up another missed opportunity. Perhaps it was just a matter of logistics, but it feels regrettable that almost all the interviews were conducted one on one. One of the film’s only truly emotional scenes is when Menzel talks about a rare group photo showing the luminaries of the New Wave together and goes down the line to point out the rare ones who are still alive. What the film doesn’t make all that clear is that many of the interviewees actually passed away during the seven-year production of CzechMate, including Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, Drahomíra Vihanová and renowned cinematographer Miroslav Ondřícek.

Although some thematic montages are stronger than others, the film’s editing consistently ensures smooth transitions between a free-flowing, somewhat heterogeneous mixture of topics. The loose structure also means that a  lot more time is often spent on one film in Menzel’s filmography while another is almost completely ignored (Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut had the same problem, among many others). Thankfully, despite the vast number of interviews with close to 100 people, we never feel like this is all just a sequence of talking heads.

Watching a seven-hour film is physically exhausting, and one has to wonder whether a theatrical release was the best format. Given the lack of a strong thematic thread (sometimes, Menzel and his work all but disappear from the film), it might have been a better idea to rearrange the material as a miniseries according to topic or time period. The screening I attended at Prague’s Ponrepo cinema had no intermissions, so for those wishing to have a snack, relieve themselves or keep their legs from turning to jelly, it was necessary to leave the theatre and, therefore, miss out on part of the film. This situation is far from ideal, and it is up to either the cinema or the filmmaker to solve the problem.

CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel judiciously positions the Czechoslovak New Wave, brief though it was, as one of the most important movements in the 125-year history of the seventh art. While the highlights include the beautiful first scene of Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt’s Joseph Kilian (Postava k podpírání), the amazing three-minute opening shot of Jan Němec’s Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) and a memorable dream sequence from Karel Kachyňa’s Long Live the Republic (Ať žije republika), the list goes on and on, and one can easily feel overwhelmed by just how talented this group of individuals clearly was.

Menzel is on the right track when he says that two of the most unfortunate events of the 20th century were the invention of the atom bomb and the invention of the talkie. Seeing what these filmmakers created in the 1960s and knowing that it had all been snuffed out by 1969, when the most interesting works were banned (put in “the safe”) in the name of “normalising” the country is absolutely tragic. Just as cinema would undoubtedly have been better off had silent cinema evolved well past 1927, the global motion picture industry almost certainly would have benefitted from the raw energy and unbridled creativity of the nová vlna continuing long after the Prague Spring. While their counterparts in France were receiving rave reviews for each making one or two convention-busting films, these Central Europeans were churning out one jaw-dropping film after another, often in very different ways. Of course, just like the French films, not all of them were masterpieces, but CzechMate certainly piques our interest, and during the screening, one can’t help but make notes of which of these films to watch (again).

Successful at conveying the mesmerising skill on display in the many, many, many films that can be classified as part of the Czechoslovak New Wave but less exhaustive a portrait of its main protagonist, this documentary hides its minor flaws very well behind an assortment of likeable and very informative individuals and editing that rarely draws attention to itself. Because of its unusual running time, this is not your average film. But then, it was far from your average film movement.

I had two minor quibbles with the onscreen text: Only the English (not the original Czech or Slovak) titles are shown, which is a shame. In addition, we are not reminded very often of the names of the nearly 100 people who are interviewed, and over the course of more than seven hours, it is impossible to remember who is who. More reminders of people’s names would have been very helpful.

Loev (2015)

André Crous

In India, where same-sex love is still a taboo (and sex is illegal), uttering the word “love” is a challenge, but Loev signals there is light at the end of the tunnel.

loevIndia
4*

Director:
Sudhanshu Saria
Screenwriter:
Sudhanshu Saria
Director of Photography:
Sherri Kauk

Running time: 90 minutes

If there is one abiding image that is familiar to and may even represent most gay men – especially those who grew up or were ever in an environment that was less than accepting of their sexuality – it is two people awkwardly squeezed onto a single bed. Whether it is at home, where the parents assume their son is sharing a room with a friend, or at a hotel, where out of embarrassment or fear no booking was made for a double bed, the desire to hold each other is one that easily (albeit uncomfortably) overrides the physical restrictions of the single bed.

Homosexuality is not only taboo but also illegal in India, where an infamous 2013 decision by the country’s supreme court found the Penal Code’s section on “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” did in fact include sex between two individuals of the same sex (technically, men). This fact makes the production of Loev, an Indian film about men who have sex with men, utterly remarkable. Not only does the film’s creation constitute a courageous act on the part of writer-director-producer Sudhanshu Saria, but it is also a very accomplished film in its own right that sidesteps many of the traps into which many so-called pink films from the other side of the world often fall. It also includes that beautiful, recognisable image mentioned above.

In the film’s opening scene, we find Sahil, a 20-something musician from Mumbai, all alone in his apartment. It is pitch black, and as his face is illuminated by the candle he lights, we see he is not impressed. It is nearly 40 degrees, there is no air conditioning because the power is out, and he is in a rush to pack for a weekend trip. His boyfriend Alex arrives and admits that he forgot to pay the electricity bill, but Sahil tells him he had also left the gas running. The mood would be tense if it wasn’t for Alex’s carefree attitude, which is nonetheless rooted in an understanding of his boyfriend’s emotional state. He takes Sahil to the airport, but not before we see him trying unsuccessfully to put his arm around his shoulder.

This moment in the car when Sahil pushes his boyfriend away is key to the film, as it not only underlines his anger but also hints at his feeling of shame when it comes to being intimate with his boyfriend in public. His old friend, Jai, who has become a workaholic businessman in New York City, returns to Mumbai for a short visit, and the two head off to the idyllic countryside of the misty Mahabaleshwar, a night’s drive south of the teeming metropolis.

What makes the interaction between Jai and Sahil so compelling and contributes to the film’s serious treatment of its characters is Jai’s attitude towards his friend. There is no tension or judgement. Jai talks to Sahil about Alexander the same way he would have if his friend had been in a relationship with a woman. The underlying assumption of normalcy distinguishes the film’s approach from the traditional anxiety that tends to accompany gay films, even in more accepting countries. At the same time, however, director Sudhanshu Saria does not ignore the lingering disapproval of homosexuality, especially in the countryside, although such moments are fortunately used for context, not to create some contrived moment of drama. 

Loev‘s many long takes (the camera is very mobile but lets the scenes breathe thanks to extended silences) emphasise the real-world setting of the story and are further proof of the director’s talent as a filmmaker. It bears mentioning that this is his début feature film.

The film’s title is equivalent to the U.S. expression “lurve” and allows the speaker to suggest “love” without saying the word. “Love” is a difficult word to say for those who fear the consequences of such a declaration. Men, in particular, tend to avoid the word, even when their feelings are clearly within the orbit of the definition, and that is certainly the case for Sahil, whose relationship with Alexander is unmistakably filled with compassion and patience even though he refuses to call it by its rightful name.

The final scenes are riveting and reveal a great deal about all three of the main characters. The film comes to a very satisfying conclusion without sugar-coating or glossing over the problems that remain or throwing open the closet door to expose all the secrets hidden inside.

Loev is a timely film that, far from seeking to understand the status of gay men in India, treats them like any other group of individuals with the same problems and desires as anyone else. This approach of normalising their identity is crucial in a country that still struggles to accept people who do not fit the perceived status quo, and in so doing, the film, focused primarily on the tension between a friendship and a relationship, marks an important milestone in the depiction of characters who also happen to be gay.

Viewed at the Black Nights Film Festival 2015

The World of Apu (1959)

André Crous

The World of ApuIndia
3.5*

Director:
Satyajit Ray
Screenwriter:
Satyajit Ray
Director of Photography:
Subrata Mitra

Running time: 107 minutes

Original title:  অপুর সংসার
Transliterated title: Apur sansar

This review is part of a series on the Apu Trilogy that also includes:
– Pather Panchali
– Aparajito

The poetry of youth has disappeared. What is left, though unexpected and not always pretty, has its own dignified arc and undeniable realism. Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu is the third instalment of the Apu trilogy, which also comprises Pather Panchali and Aparajito (The Unvanquished). Where the first two films showed the young Apu facing all kinds of domestic tragedies, besides his terrible poverty, there was genuine hope at the end of the second film that Apu, thanks to his education and his interest in all kinds of subjects, would be able to rise above his socio-economic class.

But things don’t always turn out the way we want them to, and in the very first shot of this last film, we find an adult Apu asleep on his bed, wearing a T-shirt with a hole in the back, the ink of an empty ink-well soaking his bedsheets and his shirt. Nature is also crying at Apu’s situation, as a very heavy sheet of rain is covering Calcutta outside his window. As he gets up to rinse out the ink stains, the all too familiar train whistle – the sounds of opportunity, established in Pather Panchali – can be heard on the soundtrack.

Apu has obtained an “Intermediate” in Science, which means that he is teaching private lessons in the subject, but he does not have full-time employment, and when the rent is due and he goes out in search of more work, he only finds work that he deems to be beneath him. He has retained some of his father’s optimism that things will eventually work out, but we get a very miserable picture of his present living conditions.

Pulu, one of his school friends, invites him to his cousin’s wedding in the countryside; when he arrives, the bride’s mother is quite taken with him and says that he reminds her of Krishna. The day of the wedding is supposed to be very “auspicious”, and despite the fact that the groom-to-be arrives at the wedding half-mad, the father insists that the couple get married. But Pulu asks Apu to consider taking the place of the groom and after he initially dismisses the idea, he finally relents and takes his wife, Aparna back to Calcutta.

Given the lack of means at their disposal, Aparna seems to adapt to life with Apu, whom she doesn’t know from Adam. They have very little money, and the bedroom scenes seem very cold (although this might be a result of their lack of sexual chemistry, or a prudish way of presenting intimacy; it must be said that none of the films contains any real intimacy – not even a hug), but somehow Aparna manages to get pregnant.

It is here that tragedy strikes in Apu’s life once again, and unlike the previous times, this incident hits him very hard and sends his life careening into even greater uncertainty, to such an extent that he even considers suicide, in the film’s only shot that is as visually perceptive as his two previous films. Standing at the railway tracks, his face in close-up, he is expressionless. When a train approaches, the camera zooms towards the sky, giving us a white screen while the train whistles loudly; when the camera zooms back, we are relieved to see Apu still in the frame, his place having been taken by a stray pig on the tracks.

Another scene is worth noting: Apu has been working on an autobiographical novel meant to sketch the optimism of a young boy despite his terrible surroundings. At one point in the film, he throws away this novel, dropping the pages from a cliff and letting them float through the air into the dense forest, and by implication, he lets go of his past, but the moment seems unusually melodramatic for such a naturalistic film, and I was strangely unmoved.

The film proves the point of the father in Ozu’s Tokyo Story – children don’t always live up to expectations – and having seen the development of Apu, one might be disappointed by his decisions in life. Apu is also disappointed and tries to make up for his mistakes, though it is unclear what lies ahead after the end credits roll. This final instalment of the trilogy is also visually much less courageous than the other two films, and I was frustrated by the lead actor’s rather awkward performance. The World of Apu remains a work that should be seen as part of the larger story of Apu, but it is the weakest film in the series.

Aparajito (1956)

André Crous

India
4.5*

Director:
Satyajit Ray
Screenwriter:
Satyajit Ray
Director of Photography:
Subrata Mitra

Running time: 113 minutes

Original title: অপরাজিত
Alternate title: The Unvanquished

This review is part of a series on the Apu Trilogy that also includes:
– Pather Panchali
– The World of Apu

With a tighter focus on Apu, the trilogy’s main character, and his mother Sarbajaya, the second film, Aparajito, substitutes the episodic nature of the first film, Pather Panchali, with a strong narrative that is a journey full of love and loss, presented in an unforgettably cinematic way that takes the best of Eisenstein and uses his approach in a new context without the film ever seeming self-indulgent.

Watching this film in sequence provokes the same kind of emotions I had when I first saw the series of Antoine Doinel films years ago: One feels privileged to watch a character grow in this way, for it is a kind of divine perspective, and it is the medium of film that enables us to appreciate this possibility.

In Aparajito, based on two novels by Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, we meet the young Apu and his parents in Varanasi, where they were headed at the end of the first film. They are still living from hand to mouth, but Apu has made a few friends, including a boy with whom he speaks English. When Apu’s father falls ill and dies, Apu and his mother move back to the countryside, having only each other to lean on.

But let me dwell on the father’s death for a moment. In a fusion of striking images, potent sitar sounds and a very emotional undercurrent, Ray creates the most stirring five seconds of his first two films, and in cinematic terms I would rate it close to the cut from the match being extinguished to the sun rising on the horizon in Lawrence of Arabia. Here, Apu’s father’s face is in close-up, his mouth open, receiving water from the sacred Ganges. When he loses consciousness, a very audible gasp is heard on the soundtrack. There is a cut to birds leaving a rooftop – literally released from their terrestrial bonds; first from up close and then, in another shot, from farther away – and the metaphor of escape should be fairly obvious. But it is the combination of these three shots, and the addition of the sitar, that brings about a very moving moment that does not inhere in the shots considered separately.

The film is about Apu’s journey towards becoming an adult, and besides the death of his father, there are two very general themes I wish to touch on briefly. The first is his relationship with his mother, who has already endured the loss of her daughter and now, of her husband as well. She has little hope of living a prosperous life and wants to hold onto her son as long as possible, but then, in the countryside, there is a major turning point in Apu’s life that would forever change the trajectory of his story: He catches sight of a school and decides that he wants to enrol there.

What follows is a sequence of events that deal with the second theme – Apu’s education – and demonstrate Apu’s aptitude for learning. We quickly become caught up in his progress at school, which includes very clearly defined snippets of schooling; this sequence culminates with a scene at the headmaster’s office, where Apu, now all grown up and about to leave school, is informed that he has received a scholarship to study at university in Calcutta.

One can feel the heartache of the mother, but one can also comprehend Apu’s position, and Ray does not choose sides: Rather, he presents both characters in all their human complexity. In one instance, a shot of Apu’s mother, sitting under a tree, desperately waiting for her son to come visit her, is intercut with a shot of Apu lying leisurely under a tree in Calcutta, studying for his exams. This is life, and people have their reasons and seen from the outside it might seem tragic, but we fully understand how the situation has come to this.

As in the first film, Apu is introduced in a very significant manner, his big black eyes immediately captivating our attention when he peers around a wall in Calcutta, playing hide-and-seek with a friend. As a young man, he seems to be responsible and quite shy, but his intelligence and desire to learn create expectations that the last film, The World of Apu will challenge – and make us realise once more that stories don’t always work out the way we expect. On the contrary, they have a mind of their own.

Pather Panchali (1955)

André Crous

India
4*

Director:
Satyajit Ray
Screenwriter: 
Satyajit Ray
Director of Photography:
Subrata Mitra

Running time: 115 minutes

Original title: পথের পাঁচালী

This review is part of a series on the Apu Trilogy that also includes:
– Aparajito
– The World of Apu

This has to be one of the best debut films ever shot. Based on a Bengali novel by writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (try saying that three times in a row), it was adapted for the screen and directed by Satyajit Ray, a man in his early thirties who had had no formal training in film making, but who had a passion for cinema and had founded the Calcutta Film Club in 1947. The other crew members were equally inexperienced, and Ray’s director of photography, Subrata Mitra, had barely turned 21. Many of the actors, including the young boy, Apu, hadn’t acted before either.

This was the start of the Indian New Wave, also known under the moniker “Parallel Cinema”, because the films were being produced in India as an alternative to their better known musicals. Similar in kind to the social realist Italian New Wave of the time, it also came about in part thanks to Ray’s involvement in Jean Renoir’s The River, released in 1951, for which Ray had met with Renoir and assisted during the shoot.

But Pather Panchali is much more gritty than the superproduction that was Renoir’s film, and it has certainly dated much better, primarily because the acting is more sincere and it does not contain any heavy-handed narration. The film is the first instalment in a series that would later be known as the “Apu Trilogy”, after the main character, whose life as a boy is portrayed in the first film; in the second film, Aparajito, we see him as a young man; and in the third film, The World of Apu, he has grown up and has to take responsibility for his choices earlier in life.

Pather Panchali seems like a very rough-and-tumble film, with little going for it as far as the plot is concerned, but the film’s memorable characters are all introduced very early in the film in such a way that we are immediately attached to them. The setting is equally difficult to pinpoint: We see crumbling houses in a big forest and an open field with tall grass that leads to the railway tracks, but that is the extent of the locations. And yet, it is enough: Ray finds beauty in everyday objects and has a very acute sensibility for composition that ensures our interest in the visuals as well as the narrative.

In one of the film’s most strikingly beautiful shots, we see Apu and his sister Durga following the sweet-seller. The camera shoots their reflections in the shallow pond next to them, as their movements are accompanied, as is so often the case, by the sitar music of Ravi Shankar. His music is used repeatedly throughout the film and the only time that it seems strained is during the scene when a parent finds out that his daughter has died.

While the film is clearly the beginning of a journey for young Apu, whose big, black curious eyes are impossible to overlook, almost all of the characters have something unique by which we can identify them and that serves the narrative in a very powerful way. The train is also a symbol that is hard to miss and it is interesting to note the scenes in which a train can be heard in the distance: at night, when Apu’s father mentions his desire to write and sell plays, and when his wife discusses her wish to move out of his ancestral home and let them settle in Benares (Varanasi). For the moment, these desires are unfulfilled, but as the seasons change, people’s eyes open to the possibilities that are available to them, and Apu’s eternally optimist father has to make up his mind about the way forward.

Speaking of eyes – another shot that will make an impression on the viewer is the introduction of Apu. Unlike the other characters, who simply appear in a shot, Apu is clearly introduced: His sister pulls open his eyelid through a hole in the cloth covering his face and when his eye is suddenly visible, this image, framed by the cloth around his eye, receives backing on the soundtrack with loud sitar music.

The entire family of characters, including the slightly senile grandmother, is a wonderful mix of people who cope as best they can with their abject poverty, and the small scenes that Ray has strung together form a very colourful impression that will stay with the viewer for a long time after the credits roll.