Satyajit Ray's 'Apu' Trilogy Beautifully Reflects Its World

The thought of movies from India tends to set people’s minds to the Bollywood films, the lavish, and to non-Indian eyes, surreal and garish musicals produced by the largest film industry in the world. There’s another realist and poetic tradition in Indian film though, headed by one of the greatest filmmakers – Satyajit Ray, director of 37 films between 1955 and 1991, many of them masterpieces.

Three of Ray’s first five films center on a character named Apu, who is a little boy in the first film, Pather Panchali, and who grows up through Aparajito and The World of Apu. Together, the films make up the Apu Trilogy, a project that is as smart, beautiful and touching as any films about a human being growing up.

Pather Panchali takes place in a village, where Apu lives with his big sister and mother. The father, like many of Satyajit Ray’s men, is away trying to write poetry while his family lives close to starvation.

The intimacy the film creates with the village is stunning. Ray shows the tiny gestures and objects that make up a family’s life and that show character in tremendous depth – a hand reaching for a small bowl, a bent old auntie struggling across a courtyard, the look on Apu’s mother when she is shamed by the richer neighbor because Apu’s sister has taken fruit from the neighbor’s tangled orchard, and a train crossing a horizon behind a field photographed to look like it’s glowing. At the end of the film, the family gives up the ancestral home and moves to the city.

In Aparajito, Apu, about 12-years-old, runs along the river in the city of Benares. Massive, ornate buildings loom over him on one side, the River Ganges flows on the other, with its clumps of worshippers and meditators. Apu runs past his father teaching Hindu stories to a group of mostly women in bright white saris. A strong man wheels a weight on a stick around his head, like an Olympic hammer thrower. These are magnificent, profound and to us, foreign images of the intersection of the natural power of the river and the complex civilization human beings have built along the river’s banks.

For a time, Apu runs about totally free from the cultural ties that bind his parents and apparently everyone else along the river. You feel the release, and dread the day when he too will be constrained. At the heart of Aparajito is the love between Apu and his mother, which like everything else proves unbearably fragile.

The stark black and white cinematography catches sights you just don’t see from other filmmakers. Ray shows the constant, intricate chaos of Indian life along this river. He watches the range of shapes of human beings from fat to impossibly thin, young to old, firm to frail, typical to deformed. He shows the odd influences of British culture on a uniformed marching band.

Just about everywhere, the film shows signs of ruin. Buildings, both indoors and out, look like they’re falling apart. Offices are run down; the streets are muddy.

Only the third of the films, The World of Apu has scenes in a wealthy, well-maintained home, and these moments pass quickly. Apu marries in the third film, but under odd circumstances to the daughter of a rich family. He asks her can she live as he does, and although she goes with him to Calcutta, she says she doesn’t know.

From his first films, Satyajit Ray’s subject is also India itself – a society that looks to outsiders as if it’s crumbling, but is actually resilient and at least fitfully enduring. Every moment of these gorgeous films reflects India’s age and complexity.