Old Yorker

  • Aparajito

    Old YorkerFilm review

    The Unvanquished

    Satyajit Ray (1956)

    In Pather Panchali (1955) the boy Apu and his sister Durga are quite thrilled by the sight and noise of a passing railway train.  Among the many strengths of the second film in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy is the variety of emotions experienced by the young hero and his mother as they ride on or wait for trains, or hear them in the distance.  One train carries Apu (Pinaki Sengupta), now aged ten or eleven, and Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) away from Benares – following the death of Apu’s father, Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) – to the Bengali village of Mansapota.  Another train, a few years on, takes the teenage Apu (Smaran Ghosal) from Mansapota to Kolkata, where he wins a scholarship to study:  he’s apprehensive but excited on his first rail journey to the big city.  Whenever Sarbajaya hears the sound of trains travelling in the opposite direction, it reminds her of her son’s absence, offers hope that he could be on his way to her.  At the end of one of his rare visits home, Apu stands on the station platform, anxious to get back to Kolkata but acutely aware of his mother’s desperate loneliness without him.  He postpones his return, giving her a brief reprieve.

    Aparajito begins in Benares (in 1920), Harihar’s ancestral home, where he, his wife and son were headed at the end of Pather Panchali.  An impressive opening sequence shows the locals’ ablutions – bathing their bodies or cleaning their teeth – in the Ganges.  (Subrata Mitra was again Ray’s cinematographer and, like its predecessor, this film is shot in black and white.)  Harihar works as a priest in Benares until he catches a fever and falls gravely ill.  When he briefly comes to and asks for water, Sarbajaya sends Apu to run and fetch it from the sacred Ganges; she pours the water into her husband’s mouth, and Harihar dies instantly.  In Mansapota, Apu is made to follow in his father’s footsteps by training as an apprentice priest but he’s hungry for formal education.  At this stage, Aparajito, as well as its protagonist, seems to be marking time:  the narrative feels essentially transitional (at least for anyone who knows this is the second of three parts).  The story starts to acquire a life of its own once Apu persuades his mother to let him attend the local school.  By the end, the accumulation of train journeys – of moving from one place to another – has given the film’s transitional quality a deeper meaning.

    Although not as naturally expressive as Subir Banerjee in Pather Panchali, Pinaki Sengupta is reliably more animated when Apu encounters life beyond domestic routines and religious duties.  He’s much amused (unlike Miss Quested in A Passage to India) by the sight of monkeys zipping up and down outside a temple.  He’s even more amused by the horseplay of schoolboys, which Apu watches from a wistful distance.  When he starts school he’s soon the star pupil, reading fluently as his penniless Brahmin father taught him to do, impressing the headmaster (Subodh Ganguly) and the regional schools inspector (Mani Srimani).  The sequences in both the little rural school and Apu’s college in Kolkata are consistently strong – and entertaining:  the village headmaster quizzically inspecting a cartoon of himself that the boys have drawn; a Kolkata professor (Hemanta Chattopadhyay) explaining figures of speech – metonymy, synecdoche, euphemism.  The professor offers an example of the last – ‘the saying of a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way’ – when he suggests that Apu (now Smaran Ghosal), asleep in class, may not be giving the lecture his complete attention.  Apu has dropped off because he’s exhausted.  He has a scholarship but is still short of funds.  His landlord (Kalicharan Roy) runs a printing press, where Apu works the machinery, out of college hours, in lieu of paying rent.

    Nearly thirty years after Pather Panchali and Aparajito, Satyajit Ray realised a long-held ambition to bring to the cinema screen Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World.  That would also be an apt alternative title for Aparajito, which dramatises Apu’s move away from his remaining family and, to an extent, his cultural roots.  He knows that Kolkata gives him the chance to expand his horizons, and the gift he receives from the headmaster when he leaves the village school confirms that:  a globe of the world.  It won’t fit in the small suitcase that Sarbajaya carefully packs for her son and he must carry it separately.  If Apu doesn’t yet have the world at his feet, he has it in his hand as he sets off for college.  He holds on to the globe for dear life.

    Ray’s description of the mother-son relationship is unflinching.  The fretting, miserable Sarbajaya mostly gets on Apu’s nerves (and it’s not hard to see why) but he’s conflicted about abandoning her.  That is how his mother can’t help seeing it – and feeling it:  she withers in Apu’s absence though she tries to conceal her illness from him.  When he learns her life’s in danger, he travels back to the village, to find that she has already died.  Sarbajaya’s end comes at night, with fireflies sparkling in the darkness.  Her decline and demise, and Harihar’s, are very different from the passing of Indir and Durga in Pather Panchali except that Ray makes each one of these four deaths memorably unique.  Apu’s great uncle (Ramani Sengupta) asks him to stay in Mansapota and perform his mother’s funeral rites.  Apu replies that he’ll perform the rites in Kolkata.  He sets off again for the railway station.

    9 July 2022

  • Hedda

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Trevor Nunn (1975)

    Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler isn’t a barrel of laughs but the BFI build-up to this screening of  Trevor Nunn’s film of the play was a comedy of errors.

    ‘The rare 35mm print we are presenting is courtesy of the National Library of Norway and therefore has Norwegian subtitles.  We hope audience members will not find these too distracting.’

    That was the advance warning email to those who’d booked for Hedda in this month’s Glenda Jackson retrospective.  In fact, it was the third such email because the first two got the show times wrong.  On the day, a BFI person took to the stage to reiterate the above and apologise for the visual quality of the print – one of those fade-to-pink specials from the 1970s.  He went on to explain that the outstanding lead performance meant it was still worth showing the film, as part of the Janet [sic] Jackson season.

    I didn’t expect to see Hedda just a day after Dangerous Liaisons (1988) but Stephen Frears’ film had turned up on BBC4 the night before.  As a result, I sat down to watch Nunn’s version of Ibsen with Frears’ translation of stage material to the screen, and what I felt was wrong with it, fresh in my mind.  Even without this coincidence, though, Hedda would have come over as an egregious example of ‘filmed theatre’.  (Important to make clear that it’s hardly fair to mention these two films – as films – in the same breath:  returning to Dangerous Liaisons after thirty plus years, I found it dissatisfying but it’s streets ahead of Hedda.)  Nunn’s picture was an adaptation of his stage production for the RSC.  The argument for filming a play in this way is that the screen version supplies a valuable record that wouldn’t otherwise exist.  The argument is valid only up to a point.  If the adapter turns the stage production into faux cinema, as Nunn does with Hedda, it’s not only inadequate as a film but tends to rob the piece of what may have been important assets in the theatre.

    In this case, there were additional grounds for making the film:  there hadn’t been a previous English-language version of Hedda Gabler in the cinema, as opposed to on television (nor has there been another since).  Hedda – so called because American distributors hoped audiences might think they were buying tickets for a biopic of the quite recently deceased Hedda Hopper? – starts on board the steamer on which the title character is returning from honeymoon with her husband, George Tesman (Peter Eyre).  There are shots of mountains and fjords.  There’s a crowd scene of sorts, as the newlyweds disembark and are greeted, before a carriage drive back to the marital home.  This scene-setting opening up of the play, which accounts for only a couple of screen minutes, isn’t an issue.  Once the camera enters the couple’s house, it stays there, except for a brief interlude, about halfway through, when the Tesmans’ maid, Bertha (Pam St Clement in an unexpected pre-EastEnders role), goes outside to collect the day’s delivery of milk.  So Nunn doesn’t dilute the drama.  The problem is, rather, with how he films the action indoors.

    As a sequence of events, Ibsen’s plot may read like melodrama but a suitably rhythmical production needn’t be experienced as such, even on screen.  I don’t remember finding melodramatic the first Hedda Gabler that I ever saw, a BBC Play of the Month in 1972, directed by Waris Hussein, with Janet Suzman (then married to Trevor Nunn) in the lead.  In Hedda, any sort of rhythm is lost thanks to clumsy and unimaginative attempts to be ‘filmic’ – close-ups of character as they deliver lines, reaction shots, a score by Laurie Johnson better suited to Hollywood romantic tragedy.  Nearly all the performances seem overemphatic.  Perhaps they were in the theatre, too, but, even if they were, Nunn’s technique, such as it is, magnifies their flaws.  It probably didn’t help Patrick Stewart, who plays Ejlert Løvborg, that he hadn’t made a film before this one.  Peter Eyre’s Tesman is such a foolish wimp (crudely so, unlike Ian McKellen’s Tesman in that Play of the Month) that his marriage to Hedda isn’t just bound to fail but is utterly incredible.  Jennie Linden (Thea Elvsted), Constance Chapman (Aunt Julie) and, especially, Timothy West (a jocular but sinister Judge Brack) are better but all are hamstrung by Nunn’s direction.

    So is the leading lady, though you can’t help wondering if Janet is really cut out anyway to play Hedda Gabler.  She has wit, authority and intelligent vocal variety in the role, wearing her close-fitting gown like a straitjacket.  But she registers Hedda’s furious claustrophobia instantly and unequivocally, leaving little scope for developing the character.  You not only can’t imagine that this Hedda would ever have given weedy, pedantic George Tesman the time of day.  You can’t see either why Judge Brack is drawn to a woman so full of aggression, so lacking in sensuality and surface charm.  All you really believe of Glenda Jackson’s portrait is that this is a woman angrily desperate enough to shoot herself dead.

    8 July 2022

     

     

     

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