Page 181 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

168 The Apu Trilogy

fending for two young children and an ancient aunt blessed
with a stoop, a squint, and thieving hands.

The walking pace laces the poison. Ray’s slow-shutter snap-
shots of India’s shift from a rural to an urban society make up
one of the great documents of 20th-century cinema.

Inaccurate or inappropriate words and phrases such as ‘slum’,
‘blast’, ‘blistering’, ‘sweltering’, ‘slopes off’, ‘earn his fortune’,
‘stony’, ‘thieving’, ‘poison’, ‘slow-shutter snapshots’ and ‘docu-
ment’ (shades of Flaherty) – not to mention ‘Bengalese’, which
does not appear in the dictionary – show that the critic has
totally misunderstood the setting, characters and mood of the
film. Nor does he get around to mentioning Apu by name as
one of the two children, despite Apu’s central role in the tril-
ogy. No wonder that Christopher finds little happening and the
pace plodding – he clearly cannot be bothered to look seriously
at the film, because poverty, India and everyday behaviour are
not what matter to him in movies, unless they are glamourised
and translated into a recognisably Hollywoodish idiom, such as
Slumdog Millionaire (which Christopher admired).
It is instructive to compare this review with Pauline Kael’s
equally short review of Pather Panchali, republished in the New
Yorker – another publication with a long-standing interest in
Ray’s films – at the time of the film’s anniversary in August
2005:

Th is fi rst film by the masterly Satyajit Ray – possibly the
most unembarrassed of directors – is a quiet reverie about the
life of an impoverished Brahmin family in a Bengali village.
Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new

vision of India to the screen. Though the central characters
are the boy Apu (who is born near the beginning) and his
mother and father and sister, the character who makes the
strongest impression on you may be the ancient, parasitic,
storytelling relative, played by the 80-year-old Chunibala

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