Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, 1956) (Patreon)

Considering Aparajito in relation to Pather Panchali, I began having significant doubts about Ray's approach to narrative construction, especially with respect to character. There's an odd slackness here that I think is supposed to echo the free-floating observational style of Pather, but this sequel plays a bit like a truncated epic, with large swatches of dramatic time missing but no real formal function of the ellipses. Aparajito focuses more squarely on Apu, from his youth (Penaki Sen Gupta) through his departure for school in Kolkata as a high schooler (Smaran Ghosal), but doing so only underscores Ray's general inability to provide a sense of who Apu really is.

The first half of Aparajito hurtles through a number of key incidents, most notably the death of Apu's father (Kanu Bannerjee), which provokes little in the way of emotional consequence. After the death of his sister Durga, one would expect to see some kind of traumatic impact on the boy. But this goes to the heart of Ray's method, something that others clearly respond to a bit better than I do. These early films are family dramas that are firmly situated in the mythic or archetypal, even though we are clearly intended to respond to the specific plight of Apu and his mother Sarbajaya (Karuna Bannerjee). They are avatars for changes in modern India, but they operate within a realist cinematic environment.

So in a sense, Harihar's death and Apu's decision to move to Kolkata are maneuvers that allow Ray to isolate Sarbajaya, to frame her selfless suffering as the "plight of woman," rather than offering her the kind of narrative agency (or at least overt dissatisfaction) that we saw in Pather. Apart from some passive-aggression ("It's not as good as my cooking, is it? Is it?"), Sarbajaya is reduced to an emblem, there to be steamrolled by Bengali patriarchy. By the same token, Apu's ambition -- the fact that he has discovered that he has the aptitude to study science, rather than follow his father's path and become a priest -- isn't depicted as selfish, exactly. But in essentially forgetting all about his mother for months at a time, only coming to see here when it's Too Late, Apu comes across less as a rational actor than a function of Ray's overall thematic scheme. Achieving modernity is bittersweet, because many precious things will be left by the wayside.

From what I've read, Ray did not make Aparajito with the intention of making a trilogy. The third film, made three years later, appears to have come about due to the positive response that Pather Panchali and Aparajito received. Still, there is an awkwardness to Aparajito that one often finds in a trilogy's middle film. We are dealing with points on a trajectory, and they don't always have complete narrative integrity on their own. We can see this in the film itself, as the first half is a compressed prelude to the second half's mother / son benediction. But perhaps if Apu were more legible as a subject, Aparajito would provide the impact of watching his development. He doesn't reject his mother, but neither does he adequately honor her. He goes to school, but doesn't show a particular passion for anything in particular. He's not a rebel, but he's not a conformist either. At this point, the World of Apu is one big question mark. Is that the point?