Film review: Pather Panchali (1955)

There was a major gap in my filmmaker's pantheon in that I had not heretofore seen anything by Satyajit Ray.  So, in one of the periodic 50% off sales that Criterion has, I bought the "Apu Trilogy" (not about the now discontinued Kwik-E-Mart clerk, although he was almost certainly named after this character).  Well, after watching the first one, it might take a lot for me (and it is me, because Jami bailed halfway through) to watch the other two.  I just read that one of the inspirations that led Ray to make his own films was seeing Bicycle Thieves, and coincidentally, that's the film I thought of while watching this (particularly the final act).  It's definitely a "slice of life" film, with little to tie each incident together other than the family to whom the incidents happen.  And it's also ravishingly filmed in black and white, and the center of the movie is a ridiculously telegenic small boy with huge expressive eyes.  Anyway, it suckers you in with the minutiae of events in a small Indian village (in Bengal, apparently) before [spoiler] hitting you in the face with tragedy.  The main characters are a family: a harassed mother who has to make do with very little, 

a somewhat feckless dreamer of a father, educated far beyond his rank in life, who refuses to push for money that is owed him, who dreams of making money from his writing but has to scrape a living with his learning by traveling here and there, leaving the rest of the family for months on end.  And the children: a daughter Durga (or Didi), who appears to be about 11 or 12, 

and Apu, who is about half her height and skinny, 

and who tags after her and drives her crazy.  They live in a crumbling ruin that is supposedly the father's ancestral home, but that he can never afford to repair, and the mother feels ostracized and belittled by the more well-heeled other village mothers.  And then there's "Auntie," a ridiculously superannuated, practically toothless older woman 

who periodically comes to stay until the mother can stand her no longer, at which point she toddles off to find some other relative to sponge off.  Despite her destitution, she is remarkably cheerful (and we note that all relatives take her in when she shows up, despite having very little to spare) and a source of humor in the film.  And the film is definitely not dour, and the extreme poverty on display is neither romanticized nor played as poverty-porn, but just portrayed dispassionately.  As a result, differs from Bicycle Thieves in that there's not a feeling of dread hanging over the events.  Which makes the eventual tragedy all-the-more painful.  However, the memories I will take away from it are lyrical shots of lush pastoral scenes (including one scene by a river in torrential rain in particular) rather than any feeling of squalor.  I see what the fuss is about.  One of those films that nourishes long after it's over even if you might have been distracted in the early going.