By the time it comes to its sad end, it has the substance of a tender threnody.Much of the effect is accomplished by some stunningly composed domestic scenes, well performed-or pictured-by an excellent Indian cast, and exquisitely photographed by Subrata Mitra in tastefully filtered blacks and whites. Any picture as loose in structure or as listless in tempo as this one is would barely pass as a "rough cut" with the editors in Hollywood.But, oddly enough, as it continues-as the bits in the mosaic increase and a couple of basically human and dramatic incidents are dropped in, such as the pitiful death of the old woman and the sickness and death of the little girl-the poignant theme emerges and the whole thing-takes a slim poetic form.
#PATHER PANCHALI PROFESSIONAL#
There are scenes, as familiar as next-door neighbors, of the mother trying to get the child to eat, washing clothes, quarreling with the husband or pushing the child toward school.Satyajit Roy, Indian artist, who wrote the screen play and directed this film, provides ample indication that this is his first professional motion picture job. And, in that time, the most the camera shows us in a rambling and random tour of an Indian village is a baffling mosaic of candid and crude domestic scenes.There are shots of a creaky old woman, a harassed mother, her lively little girl and a cheerful husband and father who plainly cannot provide for his small brood. If you haven't seen it yet, what are you waiting for?.THE Indian film, "Pather Panchali" ("Song of the Road"), which opened at the Fifth Avenue Cinema yesterday, is one of those rare exotic items, remote in idiom from the usual Hollywood film, that should offer some subtle compensations to anyone who has the patience to sit through its almost two hours.Chief among the delicate revelations that emerge from its loosely formed account of the pathetic little joys and sorrows of a poor Indian family in Bengal is the touching indication that poverty does not always nullify love and that even the most afflicted people can find some modest pleasures in their worlds.This theme, which is not as insistent or sentimental as it may sound, barely begins to be evident after the picture has run at least an hour.
The simple story of the Bengali family will definitely stay in my heart for a long time to come. Until the closing moments, we don't get a sense of the young boy as a fully formed individual, since he's always in someone else's shadow.
Harihar is absent for more than half of the movie, and, before the penultimate scene, Apu is a mere witness to events, rather than a participant. Most of what transpires is shown through the eyes of either Sarbojaya or Durga, and, as a result, we identify most closely with these two. Harihar's family often lives on the edge of poverty, coping with the unkind taunts of their neighbors, the burden of caring for an aging aunt (Chunibala Devi), and the terrible aftermath of a natural catastrophe. The mother, Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), worries that her husband's financial laxity will leave her without enough food for her two children, daughter Durga (Uma Das Gupta) and son Apu (Subir Bannerjee). The father, Harihar (Kanu Bannerjee), is a priest and poet who cares more about his writing and spiritual welfare than obtaining wages he is owed. It's a quiet, simple tale, centering on the life of a small family living in a rural village in Bengal. In contrast Satyajit Ray completed the trilogy on the behest of the Indian Prime Minister, pointing to the film's cultural impact. Apart from a seventy-year-old woman who made her name in the 1930s on the stage, none of the cast had ever acted before and many had been plucked from the Indian rurality.
The film is a serene and beautiful depiction of a little boy's childhood in the Indian countryside in the 1950s.The film was made on a shoestring budget by a hitherto unknown director.
Pather Panchali, released in 1955, is the first film of director Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy. The characters are so true to the ethnic rural-sixties Indian existence that one is compelled to wonder if the film was captured through surveillance cameras.
#PATHER PANCHALI MOVIE#
The film is overwhelmingly real and the key element in the movie is the maintenance of this realism.
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