THE RANKING
Three Empire writers share their takes on Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece, THE APU TRILOGY
King Kong ain’t got shit on Denzel Washington.
THE NEXT TIME you’re having an argument with friends about the greatest movie trilogy, take our advice: move past the obvious candidates (sorry, Star Wars; later, The Lord Of The Rings) and plump for Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy. Shot over the course of four years, from 1955 to 1959, Ray charts the life of a young Bengali boy called — yes! — Apu, and it’s a trilogy as good as filmmaking gets. With the trio getting the Criterion Collection treatment, three Empire writers wax lyrical about their favourite Apu flick…
GUY LODGE ON PATHER PANCHALI (1955)
As a ten-year-old who fancied himself a cinephile but hadn’t seen very much, I was given a copy of Barry Norman’s 100 Best Films Of The Century one Christmas, and dutifully set about seeing as many of them as I could over the years. In a pre-internet era, with the limited video shops of Johannesburg at my disposal, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali was one of the hardest to track down, which led me to imagine it as something arcane and difficult: I knew of Indian cinema at the time only as a producer of fun, glittery musicals, and this seemed the opposite of that.
When I finally saw it as a teenager, the latter suspicion was confirmed, but the “arcane and difficult” part turned out to be wildly off. Made in 1955, Pather Panchali was a film born of inexperience. Ray had never made a film before, or even written a script: adapted from a classic Bengali coming-of-age novel, the film’s screenplay, such as it was, was composed of notes and sketches. Many of the actors were non-professionals; even the cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, had never worked a film camera before. From that freshness to the medium, however, comes a rare emotional immediacy: even by the standards of social realism, the distance between the camera lens and the lives before it feels non-existent.
The story is a simple one: young Apu (played by Subir Banerjee, a captivating street find) grows a little older and much wiser as his impoverished family struggles to survive in their ancestral home in rural Bengal, his longsuffering mother trying to keep the household together as his feckless, high-minded father leaves to find work in the city. The day-to-day grind that unfolds is sparked with wry, everyday comedy and plunging depths of grief. All of life is in this trailblazing film, presented with no filter or artsy fuss: just tender, enduring humanity.
BETH WEBB ON APARAJITO (1956)
There’s nothing especially heroic about the teenage Apu who we meet for the first time in Aparajito. He’s a long, lean noodle of a lad with a wispy moustache who shuffles rather than strides, but I like teenage Apu — and love Aparajito in particular — because this character represents that shambolic slipstream of adolescence, caught between the fizzy energy of childhood and the hardened, compromising life of a grown-up.
Apu’s life until now hasn’t been fair, already peppered with loss and constricted by poverty, but it’s not without joy and wonder. It still baffles me that this beloved trilogy began as a first-time effort from Satyajit Ray, who stretches these films so far into the corners of realism that you feel like you’re walking around in Apu’s new life with him, watching the fireworks burst over his family home in Varanasi or smelling the smoke from a friend’s cigarette on campus. Ray’s also skilled in creating rhythm within scenes, and there’s a patient pulse to Aparajito, captured in steam trains on tracks and plodding footsteps on Kolkatan tiles.
It’s undoubtedly a sensory masterpiece and a more polished film than its predecessor. To me, though, Aparajito is a triumph because of the faith it puts in our lanky protagonist.
In a bracingly tender scene (that happens to be my favourite), Apu — who now prefers his bustling academic life over his near-empty family home — pretends to miss his train to school so that he can spend the day with his battle-worn and lonely mother. Apu may be prone to making mistakes — bigger ones will follow in the final chapter of his story — but you always stick with him, because more than a hero he’s a human, just trying to get back on track and do the right thing.
IAN FREER ON THE WORLD OF APU (1959)
By the time he came to make The World Of Apu, Satyajit Ray was a very different filmmaker from the newbie behind Pather Panchali. As well as the Apu films, he’d shot comedy Parash Pathar (aka The Philosopher’s Stone — but don’t expect any ‘Expecto Patronum!’ gubbins here) and masterpiece The Music Room, a four-film body of work that prepped him for the more resonant, emotionally shattering World Of Apu.
The series closer finds Apu, now played by the excellent Soumitra Chatterjee (who’d make 13 more films with Ray — take that, Scorsese-dicaprio!), booted out of university for lack of funds, living in grim digs and working on an autobiographical novel. His life changes when he attends a middle-class wedding and comes back with bride Aparna (Sharmila Tagore, aged 14 at the time). What emerges is like a live rendition of Up’s opening, delivering delightful vignettes of married life full of joy; we know they are soulmates when Ray frames Aparna’s eye through a hole in the curtain, just as he introduces young Apu in Pather Panchali with one eye from beneath a blanket.
Suffice it to say Ray makes huge tonal shifts and puts our hero through the wringer. As the film moves from cramped rooms to open spaces, it ironically gets more interior, locking you into the protagonist’s headspace while the imagery gets more stark (Apu scattering the pages of his novel over a mountain at dawn is stunning). In its final shots (pilfered by Ray superfan Wes Anderson for The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) it finds a pin-prick of hope which, given you’ve followed Apu from a fresh-faced child to a grown-ass bearded man, makes your heart burst. Trilogies don’t get any richer or more rewarding than this. And, yes, that includes The Hangover.
THE APU TRILOGY IS OUT NOW ON CRITERION COLLECTION BLU-RAY