# Apur Sansar (1959)

### reviewed by
Murali Krishnan

[2.5/4.0] (dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film, with the English title "The World of Apu", is the final episode of Satyajit Ray's "Apu Trilogy".

At the end of the narrative of "Aparajito", Apu is left alone in the world. At the beginning of this story, a few years have passed, but his fortunes have not much improved. Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is forced to leave college due to the lack of money. Still, his spirit is not broken. Apu accepts that his life is destined to have hardship, but that his only recourse is to live it as fully as he can. It is difficult for him to find a job, so he does private tutoring and spends the rest of his time working on a novel. He decides to join a friend, Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee), on a trip to the countryside to attend the wedding of Pulu's cousin, Aparna (Sarmila Tagore). In a strange twist of fate, the bridegroom is struck insane so the wedding must be scrapped. The only way to salvage Aparna's honor is to find a replacement bridegroom so the wedding can take place. Apu does the noble thing and marries Aparna. He is not sure that she can be happy going from a life without need with her parents to a life of poverty with him, but Aparna makes the best of her fate and thrives in her new life. Apu is a new man now that he is focussed on married life and he and Aparna fall deeply in love. Once again, tragedy befalls Apu when Aparna dies in childbirth. This leave Apu a broken man. Apu then abandons all parts of his life, including his new son, Kajal, and embarks on a journey of introspection, hoping to find peace.

Whereas the first two chapters of the trilogy succeed because they build drama from subtlety, this film is disappointing in its rejection of that technique. Instead it opts to use melodramatic turns to drive the story, and force the narrative through wrenching contortions. The idea that a stranger would step in and rescue an abandoned bride at her wedding is a standard plot device of Indian cinema. It is slightly unfair to penalize this film for the years of formulaic overuse in films that followed it, but still this is a jarring departure from the simple universal truths of the human condition that the first two films dealt with. The change in style is so unsettling that the character of Apu presented here seems a stranger, disconnected from the character from the previous films.

The pace of the film is exceptionally slow, and while this worked well in "Pather Panchali", it is a detriment in this film. Obviously the intent was to show the depths of mourning and levels of introspection that Apu goes through, but the consequence is the assertion that Apu grieves over his latest tragedy on a scale that dwarfs the previous tragedies he had experienced. Perhaps the message being made is that the dependence on romantic love is far greater than on familial love. Perhaps it is that tragedies affect adults more than they can affect children. Neither statement feels credible. One would have expected that the hardships of his early life would have given Apu some amount of inoculation for the difficulties of adulthood. Apu actually appears self indulgent when his reaction to tragedy is compared to how his mother reacted to similar, if not greater, tragedy.

The wonderful music that backed the other films is surprisingly absent in this one, outside of a few scenes of Apu playing the flute (a talent Apu apparently picked up between the previous installment of the story and this one). Another disappointment is the performance of Soumitra Chatterjee, which is often overdone, and does not smoothly communicate the transformations undergone by the character. No other characters are given much examination.

To be fair, this is a very ambitious film that attempts to deal with the heavy topics of human emotions. The visual imagery is beautiful and evocative. It is unlucky in that it is judged by the high standards set by the masterpieces that preceded it.

Moderately recommended. Although this is not such a bad film on its own, it is definitely a disappointment after the first two magnificent parts of the trilogy. The poignancy of those films is replaced here with melodrama, sometimes overwrought. In fact, nothing from the first two films needs to be known to understand this one, so it might be best to see this one first, and then subsequently enjoy the brilliance of the others.

    (c) 1999 Murali Krishnan
    The Art House Squatter
    http://ArtHouseSquatter.com

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