For a person who watched the second movie of the trilogy before the first, *Pather Panchali, *watching ***Aparajito ***was an amazing and path-breaking experience. Of course, I had seen *Pather Panchali *when I was young, but remembered very little of the movie. It was after I saw Aparajito around five years back for the first time that I realized why Ray deserves every bit of the praise that is heaped on him.
*Spoiler warning - plot details follow*
Picking up the story from where it broke away at the end of Pather Panchali, Aparajito starts in Benares where Apu’s father, Harihar is eking out a humble living by reciting scriptures and performing meager tasks on the ghats of Benares. Kashi, as it is commonly known in Bengal, was almost a second home for Bengalis, and the beauty of the banks of the Ganga, the holiness, and the freshness of the place in spite of its history comes alive in Ray’s lens. But midway through the movie, Harihar dies suddenly, in a brilliantly filmed death-scene, which is as poignant as it is relevant. Sarbojaya now cooks for a rich man, in a small village, where she believes it will be possible to pay a little more attention to Apu’s education. Apu does get educated, and in his free time, does little errands for the rich man, like picking gray hair. Apu is thrilled with the new found education, and laps up anything that comes his way in the form of knowledge. Apu gets an offer to study in a school in Calcutta, and in spite of Sarbojaya’s misgivings and her indecision, he takes the decision to leave his mother and go to the city for a better living. Thus a fragile bond between the mother and son is broken forever only to be reunited when she falls ill, or for the festivals. One day, as Sarbojaya frets with her loneliness and pain of a son who lives far away, she dreams that Apu has come back. But that’s only an illusion, and she dies. Apu receives intimation, and comes back to the village to perform the last rites for his dead mother. But his stay in the village is a short one, and he returns to college to complete his education rather than stay back in the village as a priest. Thus ends this sad evocative movie.
Aparajito was not accepted with open arms when it was released, primary because of the rather abrupt way it describes the relationship between the mother and the son. It’s not something Indian audiences were prepared for, stark reality. But it’s a marvelous film, and in some ways, more lyrical and evocative than *Pather Panchali *itself. For me, it’s amazing how Ray manages to find beauty in the simplest of daily activities, right from a child playing in the crowded streets of Benares, to the mother’s sadness when she sees the silhouette of a running train in the distance - a promise of a son’s return, never to happen. In some ways, Ray was probably reliving his early days through this movie, when he shows Apu going to the city and finding a job to sustain himself, with a printing press. *Aparajito *contains some amazing cinematic sequence, even though the drama in the movie is expectedly very little. Especially beautiful is the scene when Harihar dies, and the metaphor of the soul leaving the body is shown by a flight of pigeons flying away into nothingness. Apu’s craving for knowledge and the joy that it brings is shown when one fine day, he gets dressed in a warrior’s costume and shouts Africa. Sarbojaya’s grief is shown with acute understanding and sympathy, and at times you realize how tough life is for a single mother in the country; because first she is known by her husband and later by her son. When the son leaves her to study, she somehow becomes a non-entity. Coming to grasp with her strange situation was something which Sarbojaya never managed to do, and at some level, she probably never tried and this is what the audiences found difficult to accept.
The film is a tragic portrayal of situations which are faced by doting parents everywhere. The mother gives everything to the child, shields him from all grief and sorrow, only to watch him or her walk away from her for ever. Even when Apu comes back from Calcutta, the stilted conversation which he has with his mother, sometimes only in monosyllables, is heartbreaking to watch. When he falls asleep in preparation of his trip back to the city, as his mother keeps rambling on about some dreams which she hopes her son will help her fulfill, it’s yet another testament to how tough life can become when a parent is deprived of the love and affection of her own child.
This was one movie which influenced me profoundly. Not just for Ray’s poetic style of filming images which in itself is a pleasure to watch, even if you left out the central story of the movie. But because it showed grief, pain, heartbreak, death and longing in ways which have been a part of cinematic tradition for years, but have been forgotten for easier and more contemporary methods. Because it made me identify myself with the forlorn Apu, who is somewhat a dreamer, and made me feel his ambition - in spite of the fact that I could see Sarbojaya unhappy, I somehow empathized with Apu, and that made me feel shocked. Because I could never forget the scene when Sarbojaya bids farewell to Apu for the first time as he is leaving for Calcutta, a smile on her face, but the moment her back is turned, the smile changes to a worried and anxious frown. Because I could not believe that something so natural could be shown with such utter simplicity. Because it just proves once more that nothing in life is static, and wanting to make it static would just result in one ugly assortment of broken dreams.
I love this film with a passion - more than any of Ray’s other creations, and I am glad this finally came in Mouthshut’s categories and I am glad that I am the first to be writing a review on this one. Aparajito is one of Ray’s most lyrical compositions: a film in which the sublime beauty of exquisitely composed shots is wed perfectly to the messages which it wants to convey
An absolute must-watch.