Apur Sansar (The World of Apu)

“What will they think my neighbors,?” says Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) in the third installment of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Apur Sansar (The Word of Apu, 1959), currently being revived at Film Forum and other theaters. “I’m invited to a wedding and come home with the bride.” In another scene Apu, a fledgling novelist is chastened by his friend Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee) “to experience everything.” “Is imagination worth nothing?” Apu asks in response. Significantly one of the first jobs the destitute young writer applies for is that of a labeler. Taking one look at the Dickensian workshop, Apu flees, but the scene is prescient. While the first two films in the trilogy Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito (1957) are about the awakening of consciousness, Apur Sansar is about action. And the action is more like life than art to the extent that it defies easy categorization. All three movies are based on two Bengali novels by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and you think the pieces of the puzzle are finally coming together. The movie will be the story of a successful novelist who marries into a wealthy family. Yet Apur Sansar defies expectations. Apu literally throws his writing to the wind and in a memorable scene is about to turn his back on the one connection he has left in the world, a little boy, Kajal (Alok Chakravarty), he barely knows. Amidst all this we are confronted with a melodramatic Bollywood style cast which includes a mad groom and would be mother-in-law who treats Apu, as an incarnation of Shiva. And there’s even a period of seeming repose-- in which Apu and his new wife Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) fan each other as they eat on the floor of their humble one room abode--an idyll that is soon taken away. The only constant is change might be the motto of the this last of the Apu movies. There’s an unforgettable scene in which the rambunctious Kajal appears in the distance. The moment of comfort is followed by the prospect of the literal winding road that faces Ray’s protagonist. It’s an ending that eludes any clear direction and poses more questions than answers about Apu’s prospects and ultimate fate.

Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito

When you see the second of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Aparajito  (The Unvanquished, 1957), currently being revived in repetoire at Film Forum, you think first of Bergman. Ray was really the Bergman of India; we could also say that Bergman was the Ray of Sweden. Both had no qualms about letting the camera linger in the kind of stasis that is foreign to Hollywood in order to explore the complexity of emotion. Like the first in the trilogy Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito is really about the development of consciousness and it unfolds as as a series of awakenings. The camera lingers on the face of the mother Sarbojaya Roy (Karuna Bannerjee) as she sees her son through a gate and then you hear the sound of the train which will eventually take them from Benares to their new home. The sound is superimposed in a no man’s land between the present and the future. There are other wonderfully touching scenes such as the coins anomalously filling a plate following a spiritual séance conducted by the husband, Harihar (Kanu Bannerjee), an aryurvedic healer and the black birds flying upwards as Sarbojaya gives Harihar his last drink of water. But what distinguishes Ray from Bergman is really the satiric cast of characters who are so reminiscent of Dickens. There’s the school teacher (Subodh Ganguli) with his wire-rimmed glasses and books on exotic locales like Africa and the North Pole and Nandu Babu (Charuprakash Ghosh), the owner of the Royal Press where Apu (played now by Smaran Ghosal) both works and lodges when he goes off to Calcutta for school. Apu falls asleep and is expelled during an English class in which his professor (Nemata Chatterjee) says “synechoche is a figure of speech based on association.” Later he is comforted by a more worldly classmate who tries to get him to try his first cigarette. But a filmic form of synecdoche, a series of symbolic omens that one might find in a bildungsroman like David Copperfield is really what Ray is up to in this coming of age in Bengal. “Benares is a nice place except for the monkeys,” Harihar intones before he succumbs to the illness that will kill him.

Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali

What makes the masters of twentieth century cinema great was the ambitiousness of their project. Kurosawa’s Ikiru (“To Live”), Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Antonioni’s L’avventura don’t shy away from grappling with life and death. Truly the twentieth century’s so-called art cinema is the equivalent of the Elizabethan- Jacobean era in theater and several directors reach the height of Shakespeare in the breadth and complexity of their visions. The great Indian director Satyajit Ray was one of these. The first of his Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali, currently playing in repertoire with his other two Apu films (Aparajito and Apu Sansar) at Film Forum, is unabashedly about the perception of life. It’s an eye opener to the extent that its central character Apu (Subir Banerjee) literally has his eye opened to reality when his sister Durga (played alternately by Runki Banerjee and Uma Dasgupta) pries his lid open to awaken him for school. Starting slowly the film builds its leitmotifs like a great symphony. Apu’s father Harihar (Kana Banerjee) is a writer and dreamer who can’t make a living to support his family. Durga is a bit of a thief, but for the good cause of nourishing her aged toothless auntie, Indir (Chunibala Devi). Sarbajaya, the mother (Karuna Banerjee) is slowly bending under the burden of feeding and clothing her family. But there’s a melancholy beauty to the proceedings. A seller of sweets appears at their door, along with beggars, and the children’s images are reflected in a lily covered pond as they follow him to the house of a less impoverished neighbor. In one of the films most compelling scenes, Apu and Durga make their way through a field of fronds, following overhead power lines in their search for the train, which they have heard but never seen. On the way back, they experience death for the first time, as they come upon Indir’s lifeless body and her signature water can rolls away. Is Ray estheticizing poverty? Joyce famously said, "sentimentality is unearned emotion." Pather Pachali is a real tear jerker, but the emotion is earned in spades. If one were to ask how, the answer might reside in a timeless moral dimension that goes beyond questions of class. The rich and the poor both make decisions that shape their lives forever and at the end that’s exactly what happens to Apu when he finds an stolen necklace and tosses it into a pond.There’s a certain moment in the experience of a truly great work of art when both its creator and its audience are  jumping off a cliff. The viewer lets go because the artist has jumped and the effect is so profound that it defies encapsulation. The first of Ray’s trilogy is literally about everything. Its childhood world will remind you of other masterpieces of cinema (for example, Fanny and Alexander). But ultimately there’s no way to reduce the drama to its plot. Art has been deployed in the service of existence and the rest, to quote the playwright, is silence. Don’t miss the chance to view these films as they were intended to be seen, on a big screen, in a theater, in the company of others.