Director: Satyajit Ray
The second installment of Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy sees Apu (Smaran Ghosal) and his family leaving the village for the city of Benares. In the early moments, Apu has already become more a central figure in the story, with his wandering through alleys and the riverside obsessively followed by cinematographer Subrata Mitra. While Pather Panchali promised that there was a world outside, Aparajito begins by thrusting Apu into a playground of development, drawing him further and further away from his roots. There’s a greater interest in these early sequences in framing Apu within long shots, a means of physically demonstrating the growth of his world. He’s a figure in a landscape, sometimes even a boy lost in a crowd. As the mother, Karuna Banerjee becomes an even more tragic figure in this installment, with a sense of repetition happening as it seems as though she is doomed to the fate suffered by auntie in the first installment. The final sequence, in which Apu returns home and searches for his mother after studying for some time in Calcutta, is among the most powerful of the trilogy. What once was home now seems alien to him, a desolate wasteland of broken walls.
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