One sketch of Apu and Durga standing between two towering trees captures their smallness surrounded by nature’s great big shelter. The characters’ actions occasionally look like stains on a page. He’d prepared sketches in black ink, and the dialogue was stored in his head. It doesn’t surprise me that when it came time to shoot, Ray, who spent years working in graphic design as an art director at a Calcutta ad agency before venturing into film, did not rely on a script. Ray illustrates how the young, who are new to the world and are still feeling around its edges, and the elderly, who have long since come to terms with its limitations, understand and appreciate life in a more immediate way. Long stretches of wordlessness-as when the two children are trailed by a trotting dog, their mini-convoy reflected upside down in a river-create an environment in which the characters are not contriving anything. She shows him how it’s possible to marvel not only at rain and trains but also at the calm that anticipates the rain and the before-rumble that says: here comes pure speed cutting through a kaash field, leaving us behind.Įach frame in the film reflects a seemingly shared state of mind of the very young and the very old-innocence that grabs a hold, understanding that doesn’t make too much of itself. His sister’s affections are revealed by how gently she levers open the world for him. Durga seems not just powerful but prepared for anything while Apu is drawn to whatever he can push through a crowd and get up-close to. They provide for each other a sense of belonging, an affinity that only siblings share. She is his compass: the first face he sees when he wakes up in the morning, the hand that slaps him when he borrows tinsel from her toy box without asking, the tongue that sticks out and makes him smile. His outlook or, at the very least, his confidence feels out of sync with his wife’s fraught manner.įor most of Pather Panchali, we experience Durga in her role as older sister to her younger brother, Apu. Durga’s father, Harihar, a Brahman priest struggling to provide for his family, is easygoing to a fault. Headstrong and completely unbothered by what people might say, Durga lives in a rural Bengal village with her mother, Sarbajaya, a woman whose nagging instinct to care means she appears near-creased with worry. But this time around, I was struck by the careful artistry that went into her performance. It’s easy to conflate the two, since Das Gupta never appeared in another film, and Pather Panchali’s realist qualities often lead you to think you are watching a documentary. But since watching the movie again last month, I’ve wondered whether I was named after the character or, rather, Uma Das Gupta’s cautiously expressive portrayal of her. I’ve always felt connected to this character, the mischievous young girl with a sweet tooth who steals her neighbor’s fruit and is kind when no one else is to her old, hunched-over auntie. Because the Durga I’m named after is the Durga in Pather Panchali (1955)-the first installment in Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, and one of the greatest films ever made. It’s as though my love of film predates me, is beyond my control, and here I am, the product not just of my parents but also of their taste. Something sort of unforced, like a quirk I get to keep but was uninvolved in forming. There’s something cool, even implicative and spooky about being named after a girl in a movie.
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