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The Apu Trilogy

Pather Panchali
Aparajito
The World of Apu
 

Retrospectives - January 2004

India, 1955, 1956, 1958. Written and directed by Satyajit Ray; based on the novels by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee. Photographed by Subrata Mitra. Edited by Dulal Dutta. Music by Ravi Shankar.

Starring Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Subir Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Chunibala Devi, Runki Banerjee, Reba Devi, Aparna Devi, Pinaki Sengupta, Smaran Ghosal, Santi Gupta, Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee.

I would give a lot to go back and see the Apu trilogy for the first time. We had moved house by then, so I would have been somewhere between seven and nine years old. The movies were on Channel 4 -- one each for three days, or one on the same weekday for three weeks running, I can't exactly remember. My dad was doing paperwork on the couch. I was slumped alongside. He knew about them already; he's from India, and he knew the name of Satyajit Ray. For all I knew these were strange rare movies appearing on TV at random, an experience that got me deeper into movies but I'd probably never track down again.

After looking them up and discovering they were classics, after keeping them on the pedestal of cherished memories for more than a decade, after thinking of them as evidence that kids can sometimes get more involved in art films than adults, because they're less paranoid about not understanding them… after all that, I have just watched the three films again. And I defer to Akira Kurosawa: "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon."

The movies are "Pather Panchali" (1955), "Aparajito" (1956) and "The World of Apu" (1958). They take place around the turn of the 20th Century, the 12th Century on the Bengali calendar, and they follow a rural Indian family over the course of around three decades. The father is a priest by lineage and a writer by dreams; he makes a little money here and there performing weddings or holiday ceremonies, but wishes to make poems and plays. The mother despairs; she grows lonely taking care of the house, having to borrow money from others in the village and putting up with the kids and the overly relaxed old auntie who decides to move in. The daughter, when we first meet her, is going through the turmoil and mischief of adolescence. The son, born at the start of the trilogy, is Apu -- he remains our guide to the end.

But forget the plot details. The trilogy is not built on them in any normal way. It is about the smile on the father's face when he smokes his pipe, or eats the skin off the top of his warm milk. It is about the thrill of a sweet seller rolling his cart into the village. The joy in instinctive movements, as monkeys play on a washing line and Apu plays along on the street. It is about creeping through the trees as the lines of the leaves dance about our field of vision. And droplets of water plopping down on the lake before the monsoons come. And the eyes of Apu's son when he wonders where his father is.

It is about simple, beautiful, lyrical moments. The compositions are not clean, but they are not cluttered. They show poverty, but although Ray, the director, was influenced by Vittorio de Sica, he doesn't emphasise pain or grim social realism or ask us to weep for the noble unfortunates. They are accompanied by the music of Ravi Shankar, whose sitah plucks and flute whistles summon the soul and history of a culture behind the uncomplicated shots of nature elements and barely decorated towns.

Over the six hours that it takes to sit and watch the three films, we see turmoil, argument, growing up, growing old, death, birth and spiritual rebirth. "Pather Panchali", if I were to outline its plot, would sound like two hours of poverty and two bummer endings. But there's something serene about this series, a Godlike point of view. It wants to feel the characters' experience and journey along with them, not hype it into melodrama or churn it into a message. Study the shots of the mother in the first film. When she is alone and quietly sullen, the camera is close on her face. When she loses her temper with the family, the shots hold back and get a wider view. The filmmaking is capable of empathy, but not of taking sides -- it always goes for the shot that will emphasise calm compassionate humanism. It involves us in self-contained moments, which don't seem to be moving in any obvious direction. At the end of each movie, and then at the end of the series, we feel like we have spent time with these people; we remember them not as plots, but as memories -- the years have somehow drifted by, and we realise we have absorbed the rhythms of lives.

COPYRIGHT© 2004 Ian Waldron-Mantgani

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