Neorealism has always owed more to melodrama than some of its purveyors and admirers are willing to admit, but Satyajit Ray unreservedly acknowledged the influence of the latter in his Apu Trilogy. Starting with 1955’s Pather Panchali, his feature debut, Ray crafted a stark vision of India’s transition into the modern age that still offset its most unvarnished observations with a sense of poetry that lent classical grandeur to intimate storytelling.
When Apu’s father, Harihar (Kanu Banerjee), develops a high fever and perishes near the start of 1956’s Aparajito, Ray initially illuminates the banality of such a commonplace, senseless death by focusing on the priest’s ragged breathing and futile attempts to rally himself. When Harihar asks for some water from the Ganges, though, the adolescent Apu’s (Pinaki Sengupta) sprint to and from the river gives the film an operatic feel, culminating in a dying breath matched to the sudden flight of scores of birds outside. By framing the verisimilitude of neorealism around the emotional beat of a scene, Ray leverages pseudo-objectivity to make his subjective tragedy all the more poignant, leading an audience while letting them think they’re simply seeing reality.
Ray’s control of tone is so great that the films in the Apu Trilogy can often juggle two or more conflicting emotions and explore how antithetical moods can complement each other. The most famous of these would have to be the scene in the first film in the trilogy when the young Apu (Subir Banerjee) and his older sister, Durga (Runki Banerjee), spot a train in the distance while out in a field. They joyfully chase after the locomotive, rushing through reeds taller than them, only to return after their merriment to discover that Harihar’s kind, elderly cousin kind, Indir (Chunibala Devi), has died. Pather Panchali is by and large a story of the loss of innocence, but Ray doesn’t structure the scene as a mere sucker punch to the glee and wonder that precedes it. Instead, he places the tragic with the idyllic to grapple with the contradictory nature of life, never ceding fully to any one emotion to better study natural responses to multiple stimuli.
Ray’s approach extends to the relationship of each film in the trilogy to each other. Criterion doesn’t always release linked films in the same set, but the Apu films work best when viewed together to examine how aesthetic and tonal choices in one film deepen and contradict those of the other two. Watching the entire trilogy in quick succession makes it easier to see how the horizontal expanse of Pather Panchali’s open-space optimism gives way to the vertically crowded frames of Aparajito, whether in the overpopulated crush of the city or the claustrophobic miasma of the depleted family’s trip back to the countryside.
Apu’s long-suffering mother, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee), who seems so resentful of her poor husband and rambunctious children in Pather Panchali, becomes hardened by loss into a furiously protective shell of her former self, ceasing to exist in the absence of her only remaining child. The varied casting of Apu at various stages of his life is an obvious necessity to track the character’s growth over a short filmmaking span, but the different leads further mark the films as distinct from one another and allow each iteration of Apu to exist in his own space: the beaming naïf, the reserved student, and the hopelessly traumatized and listless adult.
The greatest benefit of watching the three films in the trilogy in close succession is to behold the incredible leaps that Ray made as an artist in such a short period of time. Pather Panchali is undeniably assured, but it favors uncluttered shots with few actors and fewer props. Though it confidently manages its symbolism, naturalism, and tone, Ray’s debut does so by ensuring nothing is in the frame that can overly distract from what Ray intends in each shot.
By comparison, Aparajito employs crowded, deep-focus images that capture not only the family’s activities but those of others, compounding the sense of modern Indian life being a part of a teeming, overlapping whole. The World of Apu, from 1959, finds Ray in total control of the frame, even using objects and people that exist independent of his direction to deepen the sense of Apu’s wanderlust and conflicting desires for isolation and belonging. Like 1958’s masterful domestic drama The Music Room, the films in this trilogy aren’t just foundational texts of international arthouse cinema, but among the best showcases of an artist’s swift maturation.
Image/Sound
The Criterion Collection’s restoration work is always worthy of praise, but in the case of Satyajit Ray’s films, they have been showcases for the company’s preservation efforts. As with Criterion’s prior releases of Ray’s work, these three films come to us from horribly dilapidated negatives, yet the Blu-rays look pristine, with stable blacks and whites, consistent detail, and healthy grain. Audio has also been salvaged from scratchy, pop-ridden tinniness, and Ravi Shankar’s scores in particular can now be fully appreciated for the depths to which they comment and contrast with the images. Future restorations will be judged by this standard.
Extras
The bulk of the newly commissioned material included in this set consists of interviews with actors Soumitra Chatterjee, Shampa Srivastava, and Sharmila Tagore, as well as writer Uijal Chakraborty and camera assistant Soumendu Roy. The subjects largely speak of their work on these films in broad, anecdotal terms, offering warm memories of watching Ray work, but they’re most engaging when stacking their experiences working on these foundational texts of Indian cinema against the subsequent explosion of the nation’s domestic film industry.
For a deeper dive into the films themselves, a 43-minute analysis from filmmaker, producer, and teacher Mamoun Hassan is so minutely observed that even the actors’ body language and orientation to the camera is fodder for discussion. The set also includes a video essay from Ray biographer Andrew Robinson, as well as a 1967 documentary, The Creative Person: Satyajit Ray, on the director and a clip of him receiving his honorary Oscar in 1992.
An excerpt of a 2003 documentary on Ravi Shankar, The Song of the Little Road, details the musician’s work scoring the three films, and it’s revelatory for Shankar insisting that Ray, even on his first film, displayed a keen understanding of music and worked in close collaboration with the sitarist to achieve the sounds that he imagined for his images. A brief featurette on the restoration process for these films shows just how much print damage was overcome to produce these nearly flawless transfers. Finally, an accompanying booklet features essays from Terrence Rafferty and Girish Shambu that dissect the films’ historical context and importance, as well as Ray’s early aesthetic signatures that he would develop over the rest of his career.
Overall
In a fallow year for memorable Criterion releases, the company rallies to put out one of its all-time best packages in its masterful restoration of Satyajit Ray’s most famous films.
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