Devi (Satyajit Ray, 1960)

Doyamoyee: Sharmila Tagore
Umaprasad: Soumitra Chatterjee
Kalikinkar Roy: Chhabi Biswas
Harasundari: Karuna Bannerjee
Taraprasad: Purnendu Mukherjee
Khoka: Arpan Chowdhury

Director: Satyajit Ray
Screenplay: Satyajit Ray
Based on a story by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee
Cinematography: Subrata Mitra
Music: Ali Akbar Khan

The dialectic of tradition and change that informs so many of Satyajit Ray's films is uppermost in Devi, as is the director's ongoing portrayal of the role of women in Indian society. Doya is Uma's 17-year-old wife, enchantingly beautiful and touchingly naive. She wonders why Uma must leave her to go study in Calcutta -- he doesn't need the money, she says. Indeed, his family is rich, but Uma's desire to become something more than the son of the wealthy Kalikinkar is beyond Doya's limited experience. While he's away, Doya becomes a much-loved member of the household, to the point that her sister-in-law, Harasundari, feels jealous that Khoka, the son of Harasundari and Taraprasad, seems to love Doya more than his own mother. Doya's father-in-law, Kalikinkar, is so infatuated with her that one night he dreams that she is the incarnation of the goddess Kali, to whom his own name is a sign of his devotion. Kalikinkar proclaims his vision and sets up a special place in the house for Doya to be venerated. The girl is bewildered, but powerless to protest. A man who has heard of the incarnated goddess brings his seriously ill son, who has so far not benefited from medical treatment, to the house, praying for help, and when the boy recovers, Doya attracts crowds of the faithful. Alerted to what's going on, Uma returns home, but is unable to persuade the frightened Doya to go away with him. Then young Khoka falls ill and Kalikinkar insists that his parents send away the doctors and allow Doya alone to cure him. The boy dies, and Uma comes home again to find his wife destroyed by the experience. What is essentially a fable about misplaced faith gains immense strength and dignity from Ray's straightforward treatment, which emphasizes the increasing entrapment of Doya in a situation she can't control. Tagore's haunting performance and Biswas's portrayal of Kalikinkar's mad obsession are highlights of a still-provocative film. It became a cause célèbre in India after politicians decided it somehow insulted Hinduism, and only the intervention of Prime Minister Nehru allowed Devi to be shown abroad.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, 1956)

Smaran Ghosal in Aparajito

Apu as a boy: Pinaki Sengupta
Apu as an adolescent: Smaran Ghosal
Harihar, Apu's father: Kanu Bannerjee
Sarbajaya, Apu's mother: Karuna Bannerjee
Bhabataran, Apu's great uncle: Ramani Sengupta
Nanda: Charuprakash Ghosh
Headmaster: Subodh Ganguli

Director: Satyajit Ray
Screenplay: Satayajit Ray, Kanaili Basu
Based on a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee
Cinematography: Subrata Mitra
Music: Ravi Shankar

As the middle film of a trilogy, Aparajito could have been merely transitional -- think for example of the middle film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002), which lacks both the tension of a story forming and the release of one ending. But Ray's film stands by itself, as one of the great films about adolescence, that coming-together of a personality. The "Apu trilogy," like its source, the novels by Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee, is a Bildungsroman, a novel of ... well, the German Bildung can be translated as "education" or "development" or even "personal growth." In Aparajito, the boy Apu (Pinaki Sengupta) sprouts into the adolescent Apu (Smaran Ghosal), as his family moves from their Bengal village to the city of Benares (Varanasi), where Apu's father  continues to work as a priest, while his mother supplements their income as a maid and cook in their apartment house. When his father dies, Apu and his mother move to the village Mansapota, where she works for her uncle and Apu begins to train to follow his father's profession of priest. But the ever-restless Apu persuades his mother to let him attend the village school, where he excels, eventually winning a scholarship to study in Calcutta. In Pather Panchali (1955), the distant train was a symbol for Apu and his sister, Durga, of a world outside; now Apu takes a train into that world, not without the painful but necessary break with his mother. Karuna Banerjee's portrayal of the mother's heartbreak as she releases her son into the world is unforgettable. Whereas Pather Panchali clung to a limited setting, the decaying home and village of Apu's childhood, the richness of Aparajito lies in its use of various settings: the steep stairs that Apu's father descends and ascends to practice his priestly duties on the Benares riverfront, the isolated village of Mansapota, and the crowded streets of Calcutta, all of them magnificently captured by Subrata Mitra's cinematogaphy.

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

When I first saw Pather Panchali I was in my early 20s and unprepared for anything so foreign to my experience either in life or in movies. And as is usual at that age, my response was to mock. So half a century passed, and when I saw it again a few months ago, both the world and I had changed. Now I've watched it again, because Turner Classic Movies scheduled it as part of a showing of the entire "Apu trilogy," and I wanted to see it in context with the other two films in the series, which I hadn't seen. It is, of course, a transformative experience -- even for one whom the years have transformed. What it shows us is both alien and familiar, and I wonder how I could have missed its resonance with the Southern poverty that I had witnessed in my own childhood: the significance of family, the problems consequent on adherence to a social code, the universal effect of wonder and fear of the unknown, the necessity of art, and so on. Central to it all is Ray's vision of the subject matter and the essential participation of Ravi Shankar's music and Subrata Mitra's cinematography. And of course the extraordinary performances: Kanu Bannerjee as the feckless, deluded father, clinging to a role no longer relevant in his world; Karuna Bannerjee as the long-suffering mother; Uma Das Gupta as Durga, the fated, slightly rebellious daughter; the fascinating Chunibala Devi as the aged "Auntie"; and 8-year-old Subir Banerjee as the wide-eyed Apu. It's still not an immediately accessible film, even for sophisticated Western viewers, but it will always be an essential one, not only as a landmark in the history of movie-making but also as an eye-opening human document of the sort that these fractious times need more than ever.