satyajit ray

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.