Pather Panchali (1955) is the sort of worthy film that I have spent my life attempting avoid. Once I heard an interview with a woman who had become the head of India's division of Coca-Cola. Called upon to defend selling sugary no-nutrition drinks to people in poverty, the woman responded in a perky way: "We make products that are fun for you and products that are good for you. It's your choice which you buy." Satjiyat Ray's first film is too arduous, harrowing, and slow-paced to be fun for you -- it's subject is poverty unimaginable to most America viewers. (A man labors four months and earns just enough to buy a few handfuls of rice, a sari for his daughter, a framed picture of a deity for his wife, and a bit of ratty fabric to make shawl for an old woman.) The characters wear tattered clothing and argue viciously over a dropped guava fruit. Everyone is constantly nibbling on something, but it doesn't seem that anything that they eat provides much nourishment. The movie has indelible acting -- you will remember some of the performances in Pather Panchali all of your life (although those memories are not exactly pleasant) and it is beautifully shot on location: many of the black and white landscapes are beautiful. But the subject matter, an exhausting perpetual battle with starvation, is too harsh to be fun for you. In fact, the movie exactly met my expectations: it is morose, extremely heartbreaking, and, ultimately, irrelevant to an upper middle-class American. Perhaps, most of the world lives like these people, but their fate seems so deeply entrenched, so hopeless, that the picture leaves you with despair -- the poverty that Ray shows doesn't even have a cause; it's simply the way things are. (In fairness, the dire material in Pather Panchali is part of a three-part or trilogy of films -- the entire project is a sort of Bildungsroman and possibly shows the hero ascending from the poverty that is his lot in life in the first picture.)
A Brahman family lives in a tiny village. The family members put on airs -- the father is a sort of poet, playwright, and, also, makes pocket-change performing religious rituals. But they are very poor -- even by the standards of their neighbors who are also desperately impoverished. The family once owned an interest in an orchard, but they have lost that property. This doesn't keep the spunky, rebellious little girl in the family from picking up fruit fallen from the trees in the orchard or, even, from time to time, stealing the crop on the branches. This little girl, Durga, is reputed to be a thief and one motif in the film relates to this reputation and how it reflects on her sad-eyed, harried mother. The mother gives birth to a baby boy -- this is Apu, the protagonist in Ray's trilogy. Apu is sent to school -- it's run by a tyrannical local grocer and he learns to read and write. Durga, of course, will have to be married-off, although, for some reason, she doubts that she will ever be a bride. Freeloading off the family is an elderly woman -- everyone calls her Auntie. She's malicious and temperamental -- age has bent her double and she's a frightening apparition with only one or two teeth in her sunken jaw, half her face seemingly paralyzed, and always shrilly complaining that she has no shawl to keep off the evening chill. The film was made in West Bengal and it seems always to be stifling -- no one wears much clothing: Auntie just has some rags wrapped around the front of her torso, she's mostly naked behind. Durga has been stealing guava to keep Auntie alive -- otherwise, it seems that she might simply starve to death. Various low-key adventures occur: a group of traveling players comes to town, Durga is accused of stealing a necklace and this causes a terrific battle between mother and daughter, a candy seller plies his wares in the village and a man who has a sort of magic lantern device that shows the wonders of India solicit the children for pennies. Apu and Durga's father who is feckless, if kind, leaves to earn money in Benares. His wife has denounced him for not taking an advance fee for a ceremony that he has been asked to perform at the coming of age of two sons of a neighbor in the village -- her criticism turns out to be right: both boys die and the father doesn't earn the fee. While he is gone, Auntie dies. Durga and Apu go across a meadow to see a train chugging by. This is the first time they have seen a locomotive and it makes them deliriously happy. The summer heat is broken by the monsoon. Durga rapturously washes her hair in the downpour, gets sick, and dies. Father returns from Benares with a sari for Durga and collapses in grief when he learns that she has died. Durga's death frees the family from their ancestral home and village. In the final shot, we see them huddled together in an ox-cart heading across the swampy roads for the big city. It's twilight and they have a lantern hanging from the side of the wagon. (Ermanno Olmi duplicates this shot in his similar film The Tree of the Wooden Clogs -- it's also the last scene in that movie.)
This narrative is elegantly presented in a series of luminous close-ups, squalid interior scenes, and beautiful landscape imagery. Apparently, water-striders on ponds signify the heat of summer and Ray has a long sequence comprised simply of bugs (dragonflies and water-striders) skimming over a pool full of lotus blossoms -- it's an exquisite calligraphic image and prepares us for the onslaught of the monsoon which ends up killing Durga and destroying most of the family's outbuildings next to crumbling stone farmhouse where they live. The landscapes in general have a distracting beauty which conceals the fact that no one has enough to eat in this area. We don't ever see the village as a whole -- Ray uses no establishing shots: it's simply some trees, pathways, a little stone altar, and the insides of gloomy houses. The poor are not idealized -- indeed, they have flaws that are apparent for all to see. Sabaryaya, the sad housewife, is arrogant and ill-tempered: in the nasty fight with her daughter, she drags the girl around by the hair. The father is useless, a dreamer, who can't make any money to support his family. Most surprisingly, the elderly woman is a sort of monster -- she is self-centered, filches food from others, and, when she doesn't get her way, angrily limps away to live with someone else (although she always returns). Apu is wide-eyed and a beautiful child but he is not above stealing his sister's few toys -- he takes tinfoil from her "toy box" to make a silver moustache for himself in imitation of one of the traveling players. Durga is a thief -- in fact, after she has died, Apu discovers a cup where a ugly-looking spider lives; in the cup, there is the necklace that Durga stole from the neighbor-lady. This woman is arrogant and hostile, a gossip, and seems to be very cruel -- but when the family runs the risk of starvation, she is the first to offer them rice to tide them over. The movie is wildly unstable mixture of the poetic and the deeply disturbing: Auntie dies squatting against a tree in a beautiful landscape next to a little path engraved in the meadow by thousands of years of people walking back and forth over it (the movie's title means "The Song of the Little Road'); the camera frames the candy-seller trudging with his double baskets and yoke through the monsoon rains, then, tilts down to show Durga, comatose, dying with her eyes open. When the monsoon blows down an outbuilding, an overhead shot shows an unholy mess of fallen timbers and thatching with a huge dead bullfrog in the center of the composition. When Apu is born, we first see him as a swaddling bundles -- someone lifts up a corner of the rags to reveal a great staring eye. It's this eye, mechanized as a camera, that will govern the film. When famine strikes, Apu's mother sells all the brass serving platters and tea pots that she received in her wedding. Later, when a neighbor discovers that the family is down to only a few handfuls of rice, she offers to loan the starving neighbors some of her rice. "Oh no," Apu's mother proudly says. "I can sell my brass vessels from the wedding"-- but we know that she has already pawned them. After Durga's death, Apu's father says that "All my plans have come to nothing." At last, he echoes his wife's complaint that she had always hoped for a better life but that this village is strangling her death. Underlying all of the exotic, and fabulous imagery is the music of Ravi Shankar providing a counterpoint to the misery that we are shown.
Renoir made his film The River (1951), also involving the death of a child, in West Bengal and employed Satjiyat Ray as an assistant. Renoir's 1934 film Toni, about migrant workers in the south of France, is viewed as the progenitor of the Italian neo-realist movement. Renoir's The River is a meditation on the allegedly documentary truth revealed by Italian neo-Realist films, an attempt to apply the elements of that canon to India. Ray continues neo-realism in his films, at least, at the outset of his career -- twenty years later, when Ermanno Olmi makes The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, he pirates the last shot of the peasants departing for an uncertain future in the big city from Ray's picture for his own movie. Thus, film influences circle, spiral and loop.
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