flight
by Douglas Messerli
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and
Satyajit Ray (screenplay), Satyajit Ray (director) অপরাজিত (Aparjito) (The Unvanquished) / 1957
The second of Ray’s
Apu trilogy immediately establishes for the viewer the new world which has, so
to speak “swallowed up” Harihar Ray and his family. The first image we
encounter is centered upon sound, as a flock of pigeons suddenly take to the
sky. The camera then focuses on the center of Benares life, the Ganges river
and the various purposes it serves: it is a place for bathing, washing clothes,
drinking, and religious activities.
Soon after the camera travels into the narrow street passages of the
city, following the games of Apu and his friends dashing throughout the
confines of its poor residents, running wild—as Sarbojaya puts it—like monkeys.
Here there is no schooling, no organized activities; the only alternative to
his childhood games is helping his mother as she cooks in the most primitive of
conditions. The Rays abject poverty is made clear when she runs out of matches
and asks Apu to fetch one or two from a man living in a room above. Caught by
the young boy in the process of unwrapping a bottle of liquor, the friendly
neighbor, somewhat conspiratorially and with what might be perceived as a
slightly predatory friendliness, offers up a whole book of matches.
Throughout the Benares episodes of this film, however, we recognize that
in his graceful runs throughout the city, Apu will slip away from all danger;
like a monkey, he limberly speeds through the landscape, stopping just long
enough to observe the kaleidoscope of sites and activities going on about the
city, including his father’s readings of religious texts.
In this early
section of Aparjito Ray’s camera is
almost constantly on the move, as the human “monkey”—as well as actual monkeys
who invade Sarbojaya’s kitchen—runs wild, and in this context there is
something so dizzying about these early scenes that we almost share Hari’s
first complaints of dizziness.
Despite his fever, Hari goes out again to oversee religious rituals
connected with the holiday, collapsing as he attempts to return home. Brought
into the house by others, he falls into a deeper fever much like that suffered
by his daughter Druga in Pather Panchali,
the significance of which is not lost on his wife. Apu is ordered to bring some
water from the holy Ganges and races off, returning to find his father near
death. Again the birds fly up—which, like other repeated images of motion such
as trains and flying insects, signifies adventure, escape, and the release of
the soul. Hari is dead.
Apu’s last act in Benares is to feed the wild monkeys who have overtaken
an ancient shrine—the images of which suggest polar opposites of his future:
subservience to ritual as against the imaginative meanderings of a young man.
Invited by her uncle to join his household, Surbojaya and Apu travel by
train, in the opposite direction of their previous flight, to the small town of
Dewanpur. Life in this remote village, however, is even quieter than the
village they previously “escaped,” and, although the uncle appears to be kind
and helpful to Apu and his mother, there are subtle restrictions attached to
their being taken in, the most important of which is that Apu must now learn
and practice the religious rituals to which his learnéd father had committed
his life. Apu is an eager and apt pupil, but it is clear through Ray’s
evocative images of children playing the kinds of games Apu previously enjoyed
in Benares before being forced to abandon the innocent joys of childhood.
Momentarily escaping from his religious observations, Apu runs toward the
children only to witness their disappearance into the nearby school. The scene
is a devastating one for both character and viewer, for we both recognize that this
precocious child of Harihar will be doomed in this small town to what I will
call the life of “the fever,” a life of almost total subservience to greater
economic and social forces, ending in early death.
He pleads with his mother to allow him to attend school, to which she
agrees if he can also continue each morning his religious activities. Through a
series of short scenes, including the visit of a local school authority and
several images of the young boy imitating the various cultures about which he
is reading—Apu’s costuming himself as an African “native,” may be a wry
statement of India’s still colonial-based values—Ray quickly reveals the
intelligence and potential of his young hero. At sixteen Apu places second in a
regional test, and is awarded a small scholarship to the university in
Calcutta.
The hurdle of his mother’s opposition remains, but with his awarded
globe in hand, he argues for accepting the stipend with such a fervor—with the
burning desire of any young person to discover the world—that despite her
severe reservations and fear for her own survival in the uncle’s household, she
agrees, even offering Apu money she has set aside for their survival.
Like Benares,
Calcutta is presented as a seething center of energy. Given a small room in a
printing shop in return for his working nights at its presses, Apu,
nonetheless, is seriously engaged—despite falling asleep during an English
lesson—by his university studies. A quick trip home for the holidays is spent
primarily in bed sleeping, even as his mother attempts to convey her own
loneliness and, more importantly, her fears that she has contracted fever and
is soon to die. She can only look forward to the day when he will call for her
to join him and make enough money for her to see for a doctor; but when the boy
falls asleep while she speaks, the audience knows that that day will never come.
When she slaps his face for his glib reactions to her genuine suffering, we
know, even if Apu cannot yet quite grasp the significance, that it is her only
weapon to awaken this sleeping dreamer to the grim realities of their life,
despite recognizing that those dreams may represent the only way he might
escape.
In one of the most touching of this film’s scenes, Apu determines he
must return to school over his mother’s pleas that he remain just a few more
days. The young boy—played as an overly gaunt teenager by Smaran Ghosai
(replacing Pinaki Sengupta earlier in this film and Subir Bannerjee in Pather Panchali—insists he must hurry
back to the city, escaping as quickly as he can to the train station. For the
last time in his life, the power of family love wins out over the seductive attractions proffered by the machine in motion, as
he purposely misses the train and returns for one more day to his mother.
Back in Calcutta, however, as he prepares for his final exams, he
clearly attempts to block out the few ties remaining to his mother and uncle.
Sarbojaya has pleaded with him to return home during the vacation, but Apu
insists he must study and cannot do so in the “sleepy” atmosphere of Dewampur.
His mother prays for his return and, now overtaken by the fever, imagines she
hears his returning call. As she goes outside to look for him, like her
daughter Druga and Harihar before her, she becomes dizzy. Fireflies twinkling
in the night sky become blurred, shining in what appears to her as a path to
her prodigal son, but is perceived by the viewer as the release of her soul;
the screen goes black. She is dead.
When her son finally arrives, having learned of her illness, there is no
longer anyone there to greet him. Apu’s remorse is one of the most painful
moments of this film, pain alleviated perhaps only with the uncle’s simple
observation: “What’s done cannot be undone.” If Apu has awakened to the truth,
he now recognizes all the more the need to reject it and the inevitable fever
accompanying it. He ignores his uncle’s demands that he observe the rituals for
her death, taking flight once again on the train that represents a society in
complete opposition to the one in which he has been born.
Despite winning the Golden Lion award of the Venice Film Festival, Aparjito is not Ray’s most appealing
movie; it moves forward in a slow pace that at times can seem almost
maddeningly static. The characters, moreover, often seem appallingly ignorant
in their lack of self-recognition. The several travels back and forth between the
two societies at war in this film also bring to the film a repetition of images
and themes that will frustrate impatient viewers. I would suggest, however,
that Ray reveals through these flaws (intentionally or not) just the kinds of
patterns that continually arise when such cultural differences meet. Despite
the recognition of those suffering in subservient isolation and under
conservative restrictions that there must be a world better than the one they
inhabit, they often resist change in order to preserve the simple dignity with
which they have lived life as opposed to joining a society that might transform
them into unrecognizable beings. At film’s end, Apu’s return to the city may be
his salvation, but he is no longer the wide-eyed child in wonderment that he
was in Pather Panchali and the
Benares section of this film. And we sadly recognize that Apu will now be an
outsider for the rest of his life.
Los Angeles, June 11, 2006
Reprinted
from My
Year 2003: Voice without a Voice (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2013).
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