FILM REVIEW: THE APU TRILOGY (RESTORED)

 Apu (Subir Banerjee) in The Apu Trilogy.

Three to one

By Ed Rampell

 

Good news for lovers of cinema: 20 years after the negatives of SatyajitRay’s 1950s’ masterpieces -- Panther Panchali (Song of the Little Road), Aparajito (The Unvanquished) and Apu Sansar (The World of Apu) -- were burned in a fire the magnificent trio has been lovingly, lavishly restored, and will be released in selected theaters nationwide. (In Los Angeles, it runs today through June 4 at Los Angeles’ Landmark Nuart Theatre.)

 

Known as The Apu Trilogy, the new version looks stellar, as Ray’s camera affectionately, meticulously follows the adventures of a sub-continental Huck Finn, the boy Apu (Subir Banerjee), growing up in a primitive village on the fringe of the jungle, moving to a city beside the River Ganges and so on. Completed 60 years before Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, The Apu Trilogy pictorially pursues the same actors over the course of the years (although not as long a span as in Boyhood), focusing on a boy as he grows up.

 

The Apu Trilogy is well-acted, with Apu’s mischievous, elderly Aunt Indira (Chunibala Devi) stealing every scene she’s in, as the lamentations of being discarded in old age unfolds. The day to day trials and tribulations of Apu and his family is the stuff that real life in the Third World -- including starvation -- is made. Their pursuit of culture and learning, despite their crushing poverty, is inspiring.

 

With the ring of truth, non-actors and a Neo-realist style, The Apu Trilogy looks as if it is a documentary or docudrama shot by Robert Flaherty (who did, indeed, make a film on location in India, 1937’s Elephant Boy, which launched the career of another Indian lad, Sabu, who is just as charming as Banerjee). Like Flaherty, Ray’s eye reveals through the camera lens and genteel editing the poetry of humanity and nature, with lyrical passages featuring exquisite close ups of insects, flowers, animals, human faces, etc., linked in a mystical cosmology of creation. However, the dialogue and plot were all scripted by Ray, based on two books by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee. Ravi Shankar’s sitar music enhances this optically opulent treat made soon after India’s independence. 

 

The reconstructed three films are simply not be missed by those who love fine filmmaking and don’t consider subtitles to be off-putting but, rather, invitations to explore other worlds and sensibilities. Ray’s humanism and virtuoso films remind us what movies can be as they focus on people interacting with one another and nature.