Aparajito
Dir: Satyajit Ray

1956
*****

Aparajito, the second part of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, explores the transit into adolescence of young Apu, specifically raising questions on religion. If the first film explored the idea of family, the second film one concentrates on faith and priority. Apu shuns the priesthood, his Fathers profession that kept him away from his family for so long, and wins a scholarship to go to school which in turn takes him away from his family. The final scene is even more heartbreaking than the first film's but it is wonderfully handled. The issues raised are universal ones which is probably why the films have global appeal but there is something magical about Ray's films that make the ordinary somewhat magical. It is now 1920, Apu (now played by Pinaki Sen Gupta) and his parents, who have left their home in rural Bengal, have settled into an apartment in Varanasi where his father Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) works as a priest. Harihar is making headway in his new pursuits: praying, singing, and officiating among the ghats on the sacred river Ganges. Sadly, Harihar catches a fever and soon dies just as his daughter did in the first film. His wife Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee), Apu’s mother, is forced to begin work as a maid. With the assistance of a great-uncle, Apu and his mother return to Bengal and settle in the village Mansapota. There Apu apprentices as a priest, but pines to attend the local school which his mother is persuaded to allow. He excels at his studies, impressing a visiting dignitary, and the headmaster takes special interest in him. Within a few years, the teenage Apu (now played by Smaran Ghosal) has done well enough to receive a scholarship to go to Kolkata for further studies. Sarbajaya feels abandoned and frightened by this, but gives in and lovingly packs his suitcase. Apu travels by train to the city and starts working at a printing press after school hours to subsist. He becomes more accustomed to the city life and feels out of place in the village. Sarbajaya expects visits from him, but he visits only a few times. Her loneliness and yearning for her son continue to grow. She becomes seriously ill, but does not disclose her illness to Apu, lest his studies get disturbed. When Apu finally comes to know about her poor health, he returns to the village to find that she has died. Bhabataran, Apu's great uncle, requests that he stay there and work as a priest. Apu rejects the idea and returns to Kolkata, a sad loneliness washing over him as he leaves. When Ray started making Pather Panchali, he had no plans of following it up with a sequel but the critical and commercial success of the film prompted him to start making Aparajito. Unlike his previous venture, where he stayed faithful to the novel, Ray took some bold artistic decisions here, such as portraying the relationship between Apu and his mother in a very different manner from the book. As a result, in contrast to its predecessor, the film was not received well locally; Ray recalled that "as for the suburban audience, it was shocked by the portrayal of the mother and son relationship, so sharply at variance with the conventional notion of mutual sweetness and devotion". It was based on the last fifth of the novel Pather Panchali and the first third of the novel Aparajito by Banerjee. The novel Pather Panchali is a classic bildungsroman (a type of coming-of-age story) in the canon of Bengali literature. It first appeared as a serial in a Calcutta periodical in 1928 and was published as a book the next year. According to Ray's biographer, Robinson, among the three films of the Apu trilogy, Aparajito bears the closest resemblance with its literary source. It was a great step in Indian cinema. Critical reception outside of India was overwhelmingly positive. It won 11 international awards, including the Golden Lion and Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival, becoming the first ever film to win both. The critical acclaim this movie received encouraged Ray to make another sequel, Apur Sansar (1959), which was equally well received, and thus concluded one of the most critically acclaimed movie trilogies of all time.