Apu Trilogy- Satyajit Ray

Saw Pather Panchali last night and was very impressed. It reminded me of a Bengali Mother India, but with less naach-gaana and melodrama. I was especially impressed with with Karuna Banerjee, who played Apu's mother. I know it's the first installment of "The Apu Trilogy," but the main character in this one is really the struggling mother trying to hold her family together in the face of poverty and negative outside influences. There are many parallels between her character and Nargis' character in Mother India, except Banerjee's character is even more down to earth.

Ravi's music is rustic, simple, kabhi khushi, kabhi gham. His stuff is always especially beautiful and worked well as a film score; it's a pity he didn't do more movies, but I can understand he had other priorities.

And of course the whole thing had the master touch of Satyajit Ray. Some of the camera angles and settings were well beyond their time. There's a scene that especially struck me, where the children are following the sweets dealer...the camera pans down and instead of showing them walking along the path, it shows their reflections in a pool of water. It's because of things like that that I was very happy to see this film on the big screen.

Aparajito shows next weekend, so I'll be back to report on that one.