Aparajito (1956) - film review

After the death of their daughter, Harihar and Sarbojaya leave their ancestral village in Bengal and move to the city of Banaras, to start a new life with their ten-year-old son Apu.   Whilst Sarbojaya stays at home in the family’s squalid apartment, Harihar earns a meagre income by performing religious duties.  With his parents unable to pay for his schooling, Apu spends his days playing in the streets with his new friends.   One day, Harihar collapses with a fever and dies soon afterwards.  This second tragedy in so short a time is more than Sarbojaya can bear.  She and Apu move to a small village where she finds work as a maid.  By scrimping, Sarbojaya manages to save enough money to allow her son to attend the local school.  Apu proves to be an exceptional scholar.  Now a young man, he is offered a scholarship to the university in Calcutta.  Sarbojaya is unable to imagine a life without her son but cannot hold him back.  Apu is soon so preoccupied in his studies that he almost forgets his mother.  He is too busy to visit her and seldom writes to her.  Then one day he receives a letter informing him that his mother is gravely ill...

In the second part of his acclaimed Apu Trilogy, Satyajit Ray continues his emotionally charged account of one man’s transition from childhood to adulthood, fashioned as a long and eventful journey that is coloured with joy and tragedy.  Both Ray and his cinematographer Subrata Mitra had made great strides since their first collaboration on Pather Panchali and together they craft one of cinema’s most visually alluring pieces of neo-realist drama, a film that is as warm and engaging as it is heart wrenching.

The power of the narrative to enchant and move is greatly enhanced by the sheer poetry of the images that Ray and Mitra construct for us.  These convey not only the appalling hardship and sense of injustice experienced by India’s poor in the 1920s, but also an appreciation of the beauty of life.  In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, this could have ended up as over-sentimentalised melodrama of the worst kind.  Instead, Satyajit Ray’s skill and sensitivity conspire to make it a humanist masterpiece.   Aparajito is a major work of cinema art that helped to secure Ray’s reputation as India’s leading filmmaker and one of the great film auteurs of the Twentieth Century.  It won several awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1957.  

There is a startling dichotomy in this film, a glass-half-empty, glass-half-full view of life, as seen from the perspective of the two principal protagonists, from which much of its truth and pathos derive.  Whereas Sarbojaya feels the whole burden of tragedy and lives a miserable existence, her son Apu appears to be entirely untouched by the hardship and grief that have befallen his family.  As the mother wallows in self-pity, completely crushed after the loss of her daughter and husband, the son rushes towards adulthood with a burning optimism and unbridled sense of anticipation.   It is as if the two characters inhabit parallel universes, one of cruel self-imposed imprisonment, the other of unbridled freedom.  These two worlds only come together, briefly, in the film’s devastating (yet remarkably understated) climax, when Apu finally comes of age.  Aparajito is a story that is universal, the story of a mother finding it hard to let go of her child, and of an egoistical child who realises, too late, what his mother meant to him.  With immense compassion and understanding, Satyajit Ray evokes one of the inescapable tragedies of human experience.

© James Travers 2010

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