Page 164 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

From Calcutta to Cannes 151

with two other jury members, put forward Pather Panchali
as worthy of a prize. ‘The initial reaction was one of shock
if not of horror by most of those present,’ Quinn recalled in
the 1980s, ‘especially the French scriptwriter Henri Jaenson
[Un Carnet de Bal] who referred to Pather Panchali as “cette
ordure” – as I vividly remember.’ But Pather Panchali was too
good for French hubris to kill it off; it was awarded a special
prize, for ‘Best Human Document’. (Nevertheless, Ray’s films
were pointedly ignored in France, especially by the New Wave
directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, until
the early 1980s, when there was a sudden upsurge of French
interest in Ray.)
Understandably, Ray himself did not feel he had truly arrived
in the international cinema until Aparajito won the Golden
Lion at Venice, the following year. The award was all the more
welcome for being wholly unexpected; in Bengal, as we know,
Aparajito had not enjoyed anything like the success of its pred-
ecessor, probably because its portrait of the mother–son rela-
tionship (Sarbajaya and Apu) was so unsparing and lacking in
conventional pieties. By and large, Aparajito upset the Bengali
middle class: the people Ray had grown up with. He himself
felt the film had some technical failings – in the soundtrack
especially, as a result of Ravi Shankar’s rushed composition
of the music. He recalled ‘squirming’ in his seat in the 6,000-
seater Grande Salle during the Venice Festival screening. ‘It
was a formal occasion and in the balcony sat Henry Fonda,
Maria Callas, Toshiro Mifune and a host of celebrities.’ But
the audience reaction, usherettes included, was good. Still, Ray
had ‘not the slightest hope of winning any prizes’. Three days
before the award ceremony a journalist gave Ray a whispered
hint – ‘I can hear the lion’s roar’ – then on the afternoon of the
day itself, ‘a young girl of pronounced good looks came to our
hotel, sought us out and started briefing me on what I had to
do on the stage that evening. “On the stage?” I asked. “Yes,”
she said, “your name will be called out and you come up to

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