Page 144 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

The World of Apu: Critique 131
agreed with Renoir. Deliberately, he divides our sympathy
between Apu and the landlord and keeps it in exquisite ten-
sion in the little scene, as he continues to do in every scene
of the film. Writers are important to society, Ray seems to
say, whether practical people like landlords acknowledge this
truth or not – but writers too have obligations to others, not
only to their talent. While there is no doubt, in the film as a
whole, that Ray is on the side of Apu, the creative artist – not
of the landlord, sweatshop employers and their dull employees,
his manipulative friend Pulu and Pulu’s conventional relatives
whom Apu encounters, even at times his beloved wife Aparna –
Ray is careful never to tilt the balance entirely in Apu’s favour
against the philistines. As a rule, villains bored him, Ray once
said – and there is not a single villain in his oeuvre, except
in his two detective films (The Golden Fortress/Sonar Kella and
The Elephant God/Joi Baba Felunath) and his two musicals (The
Adventures of Goopy and Bagha/Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and The
Kingdom of Diamonds/Hirak Rajar Dese), which were all made
with children in mind.
The theme of the first scene is explicitly developed a little fur-
ther on, during the late evening. Apu’s college friend Pulu has
determinedly tracked Apu down to his lonely garret. Thanks
to Pulu, who has rather more money than Apu, they have had
a filling meal – Apu’s first in ages – and have just paid a visit
to the theatre, where they saw a well-loved nineteenth-century
Bengali farce about an intellectual drunkard (Sadhabar Ekadasi
by Dinabandhu Mitra). Apu is feeling light-headed, high not on
alcohol but on his literary aspirations. Spotted by a suspicious
patrolling policeman, feigning bravado Apu spouts an absurd
soliloquy from the play in the constable’s general direction –
imitating the main character in the farce, who spouts Shakespeare
and Milton at a British policeman – and then skedaddles with
Pulu. In a long tracking shot, the friends amble along the
tracks of the railway yard late at night, discussing life, literature
and love.

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