Kaushik Ganguly (2014)
An interesting idea but an increasingly frustrating film to watch. The writer-director Kaushik Ganguly dramatises the life of Subir Banerjee who, as an eight-year-old, played Apu in Pather Panchali. Banerjee didn’t reprise the role in the second and third films of Satyajit Ray’s famous trilogy; indeed, Banerjee never acted again and disappeared from the public eye. He was tracked down in 1980 by an Indian magazine; at the time, he had a manual job in a factory in Calcutta. According to an interview with Kaushik Ganguly conducted by New Delhi Television Limited in 2012, Banerjee subsequently ‘became a clerk at a central government office, and later took voluntary retirement’. Ganguly’s film is dedicated to Banerjee particularly and, more generally, to the many child actors who made a big impression in their first screen appearance before vanishing without trace.
In visual and structural terms, Apur Panchali (Apu’s Song) comprises three parts: scenes, apparently in more or less the present day, involving the elderly Subir Banerjee (Ardhendu Bannerjee) and a young film studies student, Arko (Gaurav Chakrabarty), whose task is to persuade the reclusive Banerjee to travel to Germany to accept an award commemorating his childhood contribution to cinema; the story of Banerjee’s life in his thirties (in which he’s played by Parambrata Chatterjee); and clips from Ray’s Apu films. The Arko sequences (as I’ll call them) are in colour; the 1970s scenes are, like the Apu trilogy, in black and white. Apur Panchali was screened at BFI as part of the recent London Indian Film Festival and the film was followed by a Q&A with Kaushik Ganguly. He explained how, before he wrote the screenplay, he met and talked at length with Subir Banerjee. Ganguly also acknowledged that not everything in this biographical film actually happened but he didn’t make clear what events were drawn from Banerjee’s life and what was poetic licence. To be fair to Ganguly, Sangeeta Datta, who conducted the Q&A, seemed more anxious to laud than interrogate him; a more disciplined questioner might have ensured that Ganguly told us more. It would have been good to know whether the Arko part of the film was pure invention. If Subir Banerjee really is the melancholy hermit that Apur Panchali presents, it seems inconceivable that he would have agreed to emerge from decades of anonymity to travel to Germany to receive an award. (It seems not much less unlikely that a European cinema foundation would rely on a film studies student on another continent to find Banerjee.) On the other hand, Ganguly mentioned in the Q&A that Subir Banerjee had remarried in recent years and was happy with his new wife – so his continuing solitariness, although crucial to Ganguly’s movie, may be a fiction too.
Apur Panchali doesn’t investigate what the legacy of Apu means to Banerjee beyond its being a burden to him – ‘a shadow’ that he’d prefer to put behind him. When we first meet the thirtysomething Subir, he’s fundamentally oppressed by the Apu millstone round his neck: this is before his own life starts to resonate with Apu’s experiences. In the last film of Ray’s trilogy, Apu’s wife dies giving birth to their child and the grief-stricken young widower disowns the baby boy whom he considers responsible for her death. Subir Banerjee doesn’t marry until he’s in his thirties; he and his wife’s baby dies, then the wife (Parno Mittra) commits suicide. Kaushik Ganguly confirmed that this really happened to Banerjee but the film fails to address the horror of this resonance – to a man who already loathed not being able to escape from Apu – and of the fact that, unlike Apu, Subir loses both his wife and his child. Until and except for this short-lived marriage, Subir Banerjee, in his thirties, appears to be an emotional recluse. This isn’t convincingly explained; nor does Ganguly attempt to explore what difference the shocking trauma of his married life made to Banerjee’s outlook. Of course it isn’t difficult for the viewer to accept that early, unrepeated success or celebrity can be problematic in later life but Apur Panchali seems phoney and lazy in the way that it links the biographies of Apu and Subir. Ganguly interprets the persistence of Apu in Subir’s life too simply – as if nothing much can happen in it except for a personal trauma shared with his screen doppelgänger. One of the few moments in the film that rings true comes when Arko asks Subir about the second Apu film, Aparajito, and how it felt not to be cast as the adolescent Apu. Subir replies that, although he expected to play the part again, he ‘can’t really remember’. In other words, it should have meant a lot but, at this distance in time, he can’t be sure if it did.
The use of footage from the Ray films weakens Apur Panchali further. It exposes the artificiality, and the relative lack of visual richness, of Ganguly’s piece; the crucial excerpts from The World of Apu also tend to dilute the connection between Subir Banerjee and Apu, since it’s Soumitra Chatterjee, not Banerjee, who’s playing Apu. (There is a secondary connection – seeing Chatterjee reminds you of the deservedly long and honoured career he’s enjoyed in Indian cinema and how different that is from Banerjee’s own experience – although I’m not sure this is what Ganguly intended.) I don’t know the original Ravi Shankar music for the Apu trilogy well enough to be able to tell how successfully Indradeep Dasgupta’s score for Apur Panchali has drawn on or developed it. Both the actors playing Subir are impressive, Parambrata Chatterjee particularly so. This in itself creates difficulties, however. Chatterjee’s unsmiling face holds your interest enough for you to want to know more about why the younger Subir Banerjee feels as he does but Ganguly’s script doesn’t enable the actor to take things further: Chatterjee gives the impression not so much of Subir’s resenting the legacy of Apu than of waiting for his bereavement to happen. (On a slightly related point: the print shown at BFI is the one that’s been shown in Indian cinemas and starts with a warning that ‘smoking kills’ – the two words then appear at the bottom right-hand corner of the frame throughout the film. One of the more striking pieces of information Kaushik Ganguly gave in the Q&A was that this persisting visual reminder is a legal requirement in India.)
13 July 2014
