Apu

One of the most rewarding things I’ve done in the past month is to see all three films in The Apu Trilogy for the first time in about forty years. They were showing at Film Forum in a beautifully restored version, and I saw them at roughly weekly intervals—the only way to do it, I think, since each film leaves you so filled with intense emotion that I can’t imagine going from one directly to the next.

Made in the 1950s on a shoestring budget by Satyajit Ray—then a young, untried director, working with a largely amateur cast and crew—Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and Apur Sansar (this last generally translated as The World of Apu) must certainly be among the greatest movies ever made. They trace the life of the boy Apu from his birth in rural Bengal (prior to the division between West Bengal and East Pakistan) to his youth in a small village, his higher education in Calcutta, and beyond. At each phase, you think that the other movies cannot possibly top the one you are seeing, because each delves so deeply into the lives of the characters—not just their individual psychologies, but also their social class and environment, the way they eat and dress and move, the visual quality of the landscape around them. And each time, anew, you are surprised by how much Ray (a last name shared by Apu and his director) can elicit from the material. This is realism with a heightened, stylized quality, but realism nonetheless; by the end of the series, cheer and despair and every participatory emotion in between have been wrenched from you.

I remembered almost nothing from my college-student viewing, except for a few powerful visual elements:  a child running, an eye peeping through a cloth opening, rain falling on water, the transcendent beauty of a young bride, a father opening his arms to his son. But I retained a sense of foreboding that often proved, in relation to specific characters, to be correct. What I missed the first time around, because I had never been to India or Bangladesh then, was how true this portrait of a landscape and its culture was and would remain. And what I missed, because I was too young to know anything at all, really, was how fully these movies carried through on the promise inherent in film. At its best, film can be a medium that dives right into you and mixes with your own feelings and becomes one of your own experiences: in that sense it is not like reality, it is reality. And The Apu Trilogy is film at its best.