Page 153 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

140 The Apu Trilogy

alone in these isolated places brought a change in his own state
of mind’, Banerji writes of Apu. ‘In the city, one’s mind might
be wholly preoccupied with thoughts of self, desire or ambition.
Here, under the colossal expanse of the star-studded sky, these
things seemed both irrelevant and insignificant. ... Even books
that had once seemed fascinating, or important in his busy life
in the city, now appeared trivial, dull, unnecessary in his present
seclusion.’ The real difficulty comes with Ray’s treatment of Apu’s
novel, which does not exist in Banerji’s book prior to Aparna’s
death; he begins writing it during his period of renunciation, as
mentioned before. In the film, Apu, arriving at sunrise on the
top of a hill, takes the sheets of his manuscript from his cloth bag
and lets them float away down the hillside on the wind like con-
fetti. Even for such an intensely romantic Bengali as Apu, this
symbolic gesture seems implausible – more pretentious than pro-
found. (To future generations, unaware because of computers of
how only a single copy of an author’s work could exist, the gesture
may appear literally unintelligible.) Whatever justification may
be offered for it, the incident undoubtedly can derive no direct
support from Banerji’s novel.
This false note apart, the remainder of the film is pitch perfect.
Back in the village, we see Kajal for the first time since he was
a tiny baby. Or rather, we do not see him, because his face is
hidden by a frightening, shark-like mask. With a catapult, the
masked figure kills a bird, walks up to it in bare feet, pulls the
mask back, picks the dead creature up by one leg, inspects its
corpse, and makes a toothy grimace at it, reminiscent of the teeth
painted on his mask. The combination of life and lifelessness,
innocence and cruelty, delicacy and clumsiness, in this close-up
of the angelic-looking child and the dead bird – accompanied by
playful, yet somehow alien music – is an introduction to Kajal
even more compelling than our first meetings with the boy Apu
in Pather Panchali and Aparajito. There is a wildness in Apu’s
son, not found in Apu himself, due to his orphaned upbringing
at the hands of his resentful, disciplinarian grandfather; but his

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