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The child's delight in discovery is also the novice filmmaker's, thus the close-up of a young eyelid playfully pried open early in Satyajit Ray's glowingly hardscrabble debut. (The candy peddler is later glimpsed through a hole in a brick wall, a sort of jagged iris shot.) "Good times and bad times" in rural Bengal, the languid drift of the seasons regulates the tempo, a ramshackle courtyard and the dense forest suggest worlds within worlds. The opposing poles in the poor Brahmin family are the diligent mother "always filled with foreboding" (Karuna Banerjee) and the ancient, heedless Auntie (Chunibala Devi), the father (Kanu Banerjee) is sometimes a priest but mostly "a poet and a playwright" in his own mind. The children are off on journeys of their own, 10-year-old Durga (Uma Das Gupta) and her little brother Apu (Subir Banerjee) absorb the highs and lows of life with ravenous wonder. Hunger is never far off, but quotidian things exude a mysterious radiance: An urn full of kittens, sunlight filtering through trees as a cow is led through a dilapidated gate, a boy's sudden realization that he might be too old for a toy box. (The train roaring across the wheat field becomes Fellini's Transatlantico Rex in Amarcord.) Decrepit yet perpetually seeking pleasure, Auntie proudly parades a new shawl and is banished from the household. (Facing extinction with a toothless smile, she might be Yeats' "Ledaean body bent above a sinking fire," Hou in The Time to Live and the Time to Die remembers the discovery of her corpse.) Ray's progression is from still-photograph pictorialism to a gradual understanding of flow as central to cinema. Kazan's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn figures in the great monsoon sequence, the daughter succumbs to fever as a trembling flame goes out (cf. Zinnemann's The Member of the Wedding) and Ravi Shankar's sitar morphs into an unforgettable wail of anguish. Cinematography by Subrata Mitra. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |