Satyajit Ray's APU TRILOGY restored: APARAJITO (1956)
SMARAN GHOSAL IN APARJITO, RESTORED 4k PRINT
The biter, beautiful taste of youthful ambition
After the quiet sadness of Pather Panchali, the next film in Satyajit Ray's trilogy from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novel sequence, Aparjito, The Unvanquished, is almost unbearably moving, but beautiful. It's a sweet sadness, tinged with love and shot through with light and the hope of youth. This is where little Apu becomes a man, or at least is truly off and running. He loses both of his parents to tragic illnesses, a rapid one and a slow one, but before his mother dies he virtually abandons her. He can't help it. He's brilliant and ambitious. But there seems to be something cold in him too, that overwhelms the former sweetness. Life has hardened him. This film is much more kinetic. Apu's running around in the village woods has turned into going back and forth on that train that he and his late sister Durga saw in the famous earlier scene. But he's also moving up in the world, away from the virtually medieval life of a 1920's Bengal village to the challenges and opportunities of a big Indian city.
As Aparajito begins, the remaining family, Apu and his mother and father, leave the crumbling ancestral home in the village, which they cannot maintain, and move to Benares. Here Apu's father is less useless -- though he's still amiably ineffectual, forgetting his glasses every time he bathes in the river. He can work now and earn money, reciting and interpreting ancient scriptural passages for paying students. In this scene he is on the steps by the sacred Ganges. Apu is no longer played by the sprightly little Subir Banerjee but by the taller Pinaki Sengupta, who is also bright-eyed, but has a slyer, more observant look. And there he is on the parapet above his reciting father, observing for a while, then darting off to observe a more crude and popular elucidator of old legend, than a street-level body builder, who offers to train him, which he declines. He is interested in the mind, not the body. He also is more independent for basics, eating food on the street, as his mother finds out. Life is better now, but very soon Apu's father falls fatally ill, overworked, suddenly catching a fever. After pushing himself too hard, pretending he is well, he collapses by the Ganges. Carried back home, he departs this life in a striking shot sequence when Apu's mother puts a drop of sacred water the boy has fetched into his mouth from a pitcher. His head instantly falls back -- and his spirit departs, expressed as in a silent film, in the instant shift to a shot of a flock of dark birds flying quickly upward in the sky.
Now, Apu and his mother must move again, and she falters, first going to live with a rich relative, where she realizes she is a mere servant. A closeup of Karuna Banerjee's sad face tells all, and in the next sequence they've taken up the better alternative, returning to a Bengal village under the care of a kindly uncle. Now the options rapidly widen for Apu, who begs to be allowed to attend a local school that he has spotted nearby, which we see memorably introduced in a long shot, looking a little decayed but rather grand. Apu's reading performance for a district inspector is impressive: he can intone the text the way his father could, or better. He's discovering the world, and is given a small globe as a prize. One day he comes to his mother darkened in a grass skirt like a black man and dances gaily about shouting "Africa! Africa!" He's discovered a continent, and on the globe ha knows where India, and Bengal, are. Soon he's being primed for college in Calcutta, and has sprung up into the tall, thin Smaran Ghosal, with a gleam in his eye and the hint of a mustache, and the headmaster is pressing a pile of books into his arms about science, philosophy, everything, and English words are popping up in the conversation. In the big exam, Apu comes in second in the district! He qualifies for a scholarship at college.
The film is simple and precise in how it defines Apu's changing relation to his mother after he goes off to study in Calcutta, where he has the scholarship but works hard at a press by night to pay other expenses and lives in a room, that, as he writes her exciedly, has an electric light in it. The letters they exchange, shown and read, are heartbreaking. Ray makes every little touch, ever line, every shot count, and some of them can hit you like a shot. It's in the different ways Apu packs each time he leaves home, and the different ways he takes leave of his mother. She has become controlling and needy, but who can blame her? While her neighbor has cousins and children and grandchildren, she has lost everyone but Apu, and he has left her alone in a quiet village. When she becomes ill, she doesn't tell him how bad it is, and in his eagerness and carelessness, he makes the three-hour train ride home less often. Finally he returns to find she has died. He rejects the suggestion that he remain in the village as a priest, as his mother had wanted him to do all along. He will perform his obsequies in Calcutta. He has exams to take. He must be gone. He rushes off in robes, without his dhoti, shoeless, to catch the train back.
This is one of the bitterest and saddest sequences in cinema, and the local audience did not like the way it realistically depicted conflict between the mother -- who should be only sweet and loving -- and the son -- who should only be dutiful and correct. Apu is ambitious and a rebel. He stands with the new India, the urban India. He chooses science. His bustling new wold is one of algebra and printing presses, electricity and trains -- with nothing in it of the village life in Pather Panchali. Aparjito leaves one feeling devastated but wonderful. If in some superficial ways more conventional than its predecessor, it's also, because of its greater polish and complexity, even more clearly a masterpiece. It's the ultimate cinematic statement of the young man leaving behind his past and striking out on his own. The images are luminous and memorable, and seem perfect. The film's economy and clarity are breathtaking, and its aesthetic beauty seems, in the new 4K digital restoration, miraculous. If there's a finer, more fundamental film than this, I haven't seen it.
Aparajito (Bengali: অপরাজিত Ôporajito; The Unvanquished), 110 mins., debuted at Venice in April 1957, where it won the Golden Lion, the Cinema Nuovo and the Critics awards. US theatrical release 28 April 1959. It was screened for this review in the new 4K digital restoration of the Apu Trilogy released beginning 8 May 2015 at Film Forum, NYC. Showing at other US venues including Landmark Theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area in June. To be released by Janus and Criterion Collection in Blu-ray.
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