Customer Reviews

Aparajito

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the second installment in the "Apu Trilogy," by masterful Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
Apu (Pinaki Sengupta, as the young Apu and Smaran Ghosal, as the adolescent) has relocated with his mother (Karuna Bannerjee) and father (Kanu Bannerjee) to Banares. Apu's father is working as a medicine man there, and Apu is very ambitious to start school with the other young boys. This follows the life of this family, its joys, struggles and the choice Apu must make to either pursue the life of his father (as a priest) or venture out to Calcutta, as a scholarship student, to build a foundation for himself.

This film was shot beautifully and is really a great example of marvelous storytelling. Also, the acting is brilliant. The two young men who portray Apu as a child and a young man are wonderful and engaging--particularly Pinaki Sengupta whose eyes say so much in the scenes between him and his parents that there is very little need for dialogue. Beautiful.......

This is the second film in director Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy and is best viewed after Pather Panchali and followed by The World of Apu. Harihar (Kanu Bannerjee) takes his wife, Sarbajaya (Karuna Bannerjee) and their son Apu to live in Benares. Their family home has been destroyed in the monsoon and with the loss of their daughter, they are struggling to cope emotionally as well as financially.

I found this movie to be more about the struggle Sarbajaya (Apu's mother) faces on a daily basis. She is an example of a woman who has given up her desires for the good of her family. As she cares for her family on a daily basis you can see how she is sinking into the darkest of depression. Not only is she terribly lonely, she does not fully recover from the loss of her daughter. While she is surrounded by members of her immediate community, she seems to strangely isolated and alone and the unfulfilled desires of her heart seem to weave an invisible and yet debilitating cocoon around her soul.

Throughout this movie, her sacrifice becomes even more beautiful as it allows Apu to see some of his own dreams come to fruition. Apu's father makes his living reading sacred texts by the shores of the Ganges River and then suddenly falls ill. Apu must continue his education and find his own way in this harsh world.

I love the scene where Apu pretends to miss the train and when his mother worries about what they are feeding him at school. The first few scenes also show birds sitting on umbrellas and then taking off suddenly. Could this be a foreshadowing for the situation in which Apu finally finds himself? I found these movies have quite a few "foreshadowing" moments that I only recognized on the second viewing. Which is why the Apu Trilogy must be watched more than once to be fully appreciated. These are finely woven stories that deal with the deepest human issues we all must face at some point in our lives.

~The Rebecca Review

It is incredibly difficult to review any film by Satyavit Ray because he is an artist without peer...director, screen writer, composer. Unlike so many Hollywood films, Ray's films seem real, not contrived and stike at the core of our feelings. His film , Aparajito, is one of the Apu trilogy (be sure to see all three including "The World of Apu" and "Pather Panchali"). This is a luminous depiction of a family tragedy. But like other of Ray's films, it leads to a personal "epiphany", a deeper understanding of the meaning of our lives.

This is something I've found common to all Satyajit Ray movies: they're very simple; they deal with everyday life (well everyday for an Indian in the 50s, I guess) and ordinary people. There are no larger-than life heroes, or villains for that matter; he doesn't talk about memorable events or catastrophes; no dramatic tales of lovers fighting to survive the trials of cruel fate... and yet he manages to touch you very deeply. Personally, I don't understand a word of Bengali (which is the language most of his films are in), yet his movies have a lot of impact. I highly recommend this and any other Satyajit Ray movie you can get your hands on.

This was the second entry of a famous Trilogy (Panther Pancahli was the first one and The world of Apu the last one). Satyajit Ray was essentially, a poet of the image, an untiring searcher of the total expression about cinema means. His notable traveling, his expressive close ups, the admirable sense of the contrasts, that confers him a superb status among the giants of the world cinema.

Aparajito is fundamentally, the story of a boy who becomes a man through a rigorous process of growing up. After his father's death. Apu decides to study in Calcutta, despite the ferrous opposition of his mother; so against all odds, he makes the journey(once more the unerring mythic seed beneath the plot), and he demonstrates to be a very clever and intelligent pupil. The adolescence is by definition, an age of sudden changes, meditations and doubts. Far from his birth land he will know and deal with those little miseries of the life but also with the significance of the personal effort as a continuous work in progress.

Arresting images, sharp contrasts with the Ganges river working out as a big frame, a realist script with towering performances make of this movie one of the best films in cinema's story without a bit of doubt.

A must-see.

The Apu Trilogy was recently named in Time magazine's 100 greatest films. Satyajit Ray, 1921-1992, one of the world's finest directors was born into a family of elite that includes musicians, physicians, scientist, author, illustrator, photographer, singer, etc. Made in the late 50's, the trilogy is set in the 20's. Ray's career lists an impressive number of movies, books, documentaries, etc. Passionate for film at a very young age he was influenced by the greatest.

His movies capture humanistic elements - relationships, behaviors, social issues, conflicts. He allows the viewer to grasp these emotions that leave you thinking. Ray has been known to use memorable characters with distinguished faces.

If you plan on viewing this, see the Pather Panchali, the first of the trilogy. You will learn that the family experiences economic, ecological & emotional hardships. Tragedy strikes and the family moves to the city. Sarbojaya endured lonliness and desperation, and sheer frustration while living in poverty.

Now, in the second movie, Aparajito, Sarbojaya faces a life without a husband, and her remaining child begs for an education; wins a scholarship and travels to Calcutta for further studies. Like his father, Apu is now away from home on long stretches, as he will embark on a journey to be educated. His mother tries to make him feel guilty about leaving, with no one to care for her, but he isn't too concerned about her lonliness.

What puzzled me was that this appears to be a loving family, but when Apu goes away to Calcutta to study, or arrives for a visit, his mother and he do not as much as exchange a hug. Perhaps this is the custom, but I found it ironic.

This DVD is at times difficult to read, with white letters against no black background. And, unfortunately, the DVD lacks commentary!! How wonderful it would be to have had commentary about Ray and his vision as a director. If you value film from world's greatest directors, include Satyajit Ray ......Rizzo

As with the first film in Apu trilogy, I once again find myself more interested in one of the women in the story than Apu himself, although the young boy (Pinaki Sengupta) has turned into an adolescent (Smaran Ghosal) and finally has something to do. In "Pather Panchali" it was Apu's sister Durga, while in "Aparajito" ("The Unvanquished") it is his mother, Sarbajaya (Karuna Bannerjee). After the tragic death of Durga and the destruction of the family's home, Harihar (Kanua Bannerjee) has taken his wife and son to live in the big city of Benares. Harihar makes a meager living reading sacred texts by the holy Ganges River and selling herbal remedies. But when he falls ill Sarbajaya has to learn to cope on her own and takes Apu to the country, where she works as the cook for a wealthy family. Meanwhile, Apu turns out to be an excellent scholar and does well in school. Eventually he goes away to the university in Calcutta. Sarbajaya does not want her son to go, but she cannot stop him and while she waits patiently for him to come home she get sick and grows weaker.

The climax of this film comes when Apu finally learns of his mother's illness and has to decide if he will stay for his final exams or return to her side and skip the exams. Based on the novel "Aparajito" by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, at the heart of Satyajit Ray's film adaptation is the performance of Bannerjee as a woman who has lost everything in the world except a beloved son who is to busy to even bother to write her a letter (like father, like son, for those who have seen "Pather Panchali"). This film is not as powerful as it predecessor, but that is invariably true of all middle films in a movie trilogy, and the finale, "Apur Sansar" is a great climax. However, there is also the fact that Apu is not a particularly sympathetic figure. We appreciate that he is good at his studies, but that and life in the city consume him while his mother sits at home, getting weaker, and wondering when she will see him again.

Two of the pillars on which Ray's cinematic success is based is his cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, who had been a still photographer when Ray drafted him to film these movies, and the then unknown Ravi Shankar, whose music often takes the place of voices in these films. When they gave Ray his honorary Oscar in 1992, shortly before the director's death, they cited him: "For his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures and for his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world." Individually and collectively, the Apu Trilogy certainly provides ample evidence in support of the claim.

The first film of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali, was such a great film that, naturally, the second film in the series was bound to suffer a bit of a let down. Thus, Aparajito (The Unvanquished)- based on the novel Aparajita, by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, is not the unadulterated great piece of art that Pather Panchali is. Like many middle films of a series, it suffers from the infamous middle filmitis; when films that are not first in a series rely too heavily upon an audience's memories of earlier films to inform them of the traits of characters, the chronology of prior events, and a general knowledge of the world the film series is set in.

Aparajito falls into this trap, however, in a way different from your average Hollywood blockbuster film. Whereas most middle films feel a need to fall back on what already passed in a first film, Aparajito spends too much time ignoring the traits and actions that occurred in Pather Panchali; almost as if Ray wanted to sever connections between the two films. He achieves this by having the film's lead character, Apu, not being played by the child who portrayed him in the first film- Subir Banerjee. In this film, Apu is first played by Pinaki Sen Gupta, when ten; and later by Smaran Ghosal, when in hi slate teens. Two of the actors from the first film were retained: Kanu Banerjee as Harihar- Apu's father, and his wife Sarbajaya- still played by Karuna Banerjee. However, there has been a major personality shift in Sarbajaya- likely the only evidence of the death of Durga- Apu's older sister, from the first film. Whereas Sarbajaya was bossy and condescending in the first film- while also being loving, in this film she's timid and let's life play her; whereas in the first film she was restive, and dissatisfied with what life brought....The abrupt and disappointing ending is merely the most manifest sign of this tendency to rely on the fact that the viewer will have seen Pather Panchali. If coming to Aparajito on its own, most viewers will be a) lost, or b) more likely simply not as prone to care for either Sarbajaya nor Apu.

That stated, this is an excellent film which, asides from the death scenes, contains excellent poesy and metaphors- such as a scene where Apu enters Calcutta on a train, holding a small globe, given to him as a gift by the headmaster at the school in his mother's employer's village. The film also makes good use of humor, such as scenes where the young Apu plays around with monkeys and bells, and later, as a student, in an English class, where he falls asleep (due to working a job and his studiousness) during a lecture on synecdoche and metonymy. It also has moments of universality, such as when the mother and son reacquaint after a long stay at school, and the first thing Sarbajaya says is that Apu has grown taller and doesn't appear to be eating well, despite the fact that neither is true. But, the film's greatest strength is its depiction of fortuity. Despite its flaws, Aparajito is a great what if? movie- had his sister and father not died early, would Apu have ended up in college? Had his mother not been emotionally devastated by both losses, would she have domineered her son into submission when he wanted to go abroad? All of his family's losses, and deaths- his auntie, his sister, his father, his mother, all serve Apu's benefit. In short, death has been very, very good for Apu- both in allowing him to grow and removing obstacles to his own self-fulfillment, which may be the most damning (and tangential) criticism of religion (and its fetishizing by religion) that Ray makes in this whole film (as well as in the first film).

Like the domestic troubles and idiocies that abound in a typical Yasujiro Ozu film, which almost always transcends to the universal, Satyajit Ray's films seem to likewise contain personal and comic moments that all viewers, from any background, can relate to. The problem with Aparajito- especially in relation to Pather Panchali, is that- as far as domestic troubles go, the first film's were more existential and deeper in nature, making those suffered in Aparajito seem trivial by comparison. But, that is the trouble with comparing excellent art to great art- it always suffers by the comparison. On its own, Aparajito is an outstanding film, and, hopefully, provides merely a relatively weak link to a final film that is the equal of Pather Panchali, and one that shows Apu finally taking center stage in his titular trilogy's plight.

Aparajito, or the Unvanquished, follows the life and transition of the child Apu, who is first introduced in Ray's film, Pather Panchali, to a responsible young man. This movie is about many things. About ambition and duty, about a mother's selfless love for her son, about growing up and new discoveries. We cannot but share in the wonder of the innocent and intelligent Apu, as a young man, when he comes to the big city Calcutta, from his home in the closed and remote village. Ray brings home the sad but unavoidable fact of life, that the little birds must leave their nest once they grow up to search for new horizons. Again the movie touches us all, for there is a Aparajito within us all, the undaunted soul which pushes us to strive for our dreams. This movie pays tribute to that undaunted Aparajito who is hidden somewhere within all of us.

This was my favorite of the three Apu films, perhaps because it has the most time without prolonged misery. This film was much easier to watch than the first. If you had trouble with that film, I would recommend you first watch the 2001 NZ film Rain before moving onto this film. Rain was obviously strongly influenced by Pather Panchali.

By moving us slowly though Apu's life in the three movies, Ray shows us the world as it appeared coming out of a small rural Bengali village. In the first film, Apu's father ventured out of the village, but the cameras never did. In this film, Apu makes it to medium sized towns, and eventually to the Bengali Manhattan of Calcutta.

If you enjoyed these films, I would recommend looking up the 1960 film "A Cloud-Capped Star" by director R. Ghatak. For a look at an upscale Indian life that Apu would never see, Mira Nair's 2001 hit Monsoon Wedding is a nice antidote to Ray's brand of Dravidian misery (although I recommend watching it on DVD with the English subtitles on to ease understanding).

As to the DVD quality of Aparajito, its really no better than the VHS tapes readily available, although its nice to see that the film is at least getting some attention. Ray's "Days and Nights in the Forest" (1970) and "Distant Thunder" (1973) are also long overdue for restoration and re-release.