PATHER PANCHALI Movie Review

The Song of the Road
The Saga of the Road
The Lament of the Path

Apu, a young Bengali boy, is growing up in rural India with his parents, his sister Durga, and his aged, beloved Auntie, who is somewhat disabled and more than a little cranky. While Apu's father goes off to the city on one of his many attempts to find work, his mother becomes overwhelmed by the difficulty of keeping her family together and healthy in such impoverished conditions. The first feature film by India's Satyajit Ray became part one of an epic, but intimate, trilogy chronicling the coming-of-age and young adulthood of Apu. Together, the three films—which include Aparajito and The World of Apu, and which have come to be known collectively as “The Apu Trilogy“—constitute one of the richest, most eloquent, most deeply moving of all cinematic portraits of the human condition. Pather Panchali is one of the most heartbreaking of the trilogy, for it includes the death from fever of Apu's sister, as well as Auntie's death after she's driven out into the forest by Apu's overwrought mother. But this is hardly a maudlin tearjerker. Ray achieves the miraculous from the opening moments of his masterwork. Every step along the way we share in the emotional and intellectual development of this curious, sweet, knowledge-hungry little boy, and we see him wrestle with countless obstacles that his poverty places before him and his family. In its intimacy and specificity, “The Apu Trilogy” becomes utterly universal. The quiet delicacy of Ray's assured vision is finally staggering in its larger implications, and the series of small incidents we've lived through become emotionally overwhelming. Pather Panchali was dismissed as primitive when it was first screened at the Cannes Film Festival, but the great French critic André Bazin championed it behind the scenes and the Cannes jury gave it a special award. (In 1991, after; a lifetime of brilliant achievements, Ray received a special Academy Award; he was forced to accept it from the hospital bed in which he would die just weeks later.) “The Apu Trilogy was unavailable in the U.S. for more than a decade when Merchant-Ivory productions assisted in the restoration of new prints of many of Ray's major films, including those in “The Apu Trilogy.” It's available at last in a beautifully remastered video edition. Score by Ravi Shankar.

NEXT STOP … Aparajito, The World of Apu, Forbidden Games

1954 112m/B IN Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Subir Banerji, Runki Banerji. Chunibal Devi; D: Satyajit Ray; W: Satyajit Ray; M: Ravi Shankar VHS NOS, FCT, MRV