Film review

  • The World of Apu

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Apur Sansar

    Satyajit Ray (1959)

    Plans to watch Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy this month in the proper sequence were thwarted – by a combination of my feebleness and a problem with the air conditioning in NFT1 on the evening I’d booked to see Pather Panchali and Aparajito back to back.  Although I felt guilty about it, I had to get out before the first film was over and didn’t return even after a breather.  I saw Pather Panchali on television, twenty years or so ago, but it’s frustrating that I’ve now seen The World of Apu, the last of the trilogy, but not the intervening Aparajito[1].  An additional frustration watching The World of Apu:  the whitish subtitles were often difficult to read – even if Ray’s actors are so expressive that you can usually get the gist of what they’re saying without the words.  (It’s interesting too – as it was in The Big City – that the characters choose to speak certain words and phrases in English rather than Bengali.)   The BFI’s programme notes for their Satyajit Ray season include a summary of the continuing work, sponsored by AMPAS, to preserve and restore Ray’s work.  On the evidence of this print, the project might usefully do some work on the subtitles too.   But The World of Apu is an emotionally supple and demanding film:  moaning about the subtitles makes me feel guilty all over again.

    In a brief prologue the camera shows a glowing reference which Apu’s college teacher has written for him.  Apu has completed his ‘intermediate certificate’.  The teacher wants him to continue with a full degree course but Apu hasn’t the money to pay for it.  He earns a little from private tutoring but not enough, as his landlord reminds Apu in an early scene, to pay the rent for a small room in a building next to a railway line.  Apu’s main interest is in working on a novel which, when he describes it to an old friend, Pulu, who looks him up, is strongly autobiographical.  The film’s many rich and remarkable sequences include the first one after the prologue.  Apu wakes to find that rainwater has dripped onto his bedclothes and the pages of his manuscript that he evidently went to sleep with.  He takes the bed sheets out onto a balcony to wash them in the rain and ends up almost dancing in the downpour, drenched and exultant.   Dressed and shaved, Apu goes out into Calcutta in search of employment but he doesn’t get far:  a teaching job he inquires about requires a graduate; he takes one look at workers in a pharmaceutical factory and returns home.  When he and Pulu go out that evening, the latter suggests office work but Apu rejects this too as soul-destroying.  ‘Life is for living’, he tells Pulu, and that opening rain dance expresses Apu’s sheer joy of being alive.

    The evening with Pulu, although it doesn’t occupy much screen time, moves through different stages – a meal, a walk over the railway bridge after dark (with clearly legible subtitles!) during which Apu recites poetry with feeling and too loudly.  There’s a continuing lively conversation between the two young men; this episode has an amplitude that makes you feel you’ve partaken of the whole experience.  Pulu invites Apu to come with him to his cousin’s wedding in a village called Khulna.  The passage that follows echoes the shifting quality of the evening with Pulu but in a more expansive way.  We watch the bride, Aparna, being got ready by her mother and other attendants and the arrival of the bridegroom’s retinue along the river bank, the groom borne in a litter, a band playing ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’.  Apu is seen lying asleep above the same river bank, a book of poetry on his chest.   As soon as the bridegroom appears it’s clear there’s something very wrong.   He’s evidently mentally ill and Aparna’s mother refuses to let the wedding go ahead.  If a marriage doesn’t take place at the appointed time, however, the bride is cursed – so a new bridegroom is required.   Pulu asks Apu if he’s willing.  Apu, unsurprisingly, refuses but, after mulling things over, changes his mind.   Satyajit Ray had the following to say about this part of the story:

    ‘A western viewer ignorant of orthodox Hindu customs must find the episode highly bizarre.  But since Apu himself finds it so, and since his action is prompted by compassion, the viewer accepts it on moral grounds, though given no opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of a seemingly irrational practice.’

    I think this is right – but also that a Western viewer is likely to find the idea of arranged marriage so odd anyway that what happens here can be accepted as an extension of a practice that already seems crazy.   And, as Ray suggests, Apu’s decision makes sense, both morally and because of his determination to experience life.

    Through his short-lived marriage to Aparna, Apu has intense experiences of life and death.  The sequences of their domestic life together are effortlessly intimate and eccentrically funny.  Aparna returns to Khulna, leaving Apu in Calcutta, in the boring office job he’s now taken to pay the rent.  The baby is premature and, although he survives, Aparna dies in childbirth. The lightness of the marital scenes makes the intervention of death all the more shocking and dislocating:  it brings the fluidity of The World of Apu to a halt – Apu seems nearly unable to move, and Ray’s camera slows down with him.  Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Apu, looks to age decades.  An earlier volatility of feeling returns in the final part of the film – in terms of what happens in the relationship between Apu and his son Kajal – but the weight of bereavement never quite lifts, and this is right:  the brutal rupture of Aparna’s death can’t be erased.   While she is back in Khulna, she and Apu exchange letters and we hear Aparna’s voice reading one of hers, threatening playfully that if she doesn’t get the letter he owes her she’ll never love him again – ‘Never, never, never’:  the words are repeated, and their effect is soon very poignant.

    The widowed Apu abandons his novel – standing on a high hill, he lets the wind carry the pages of the manuscript away.  He leaves Calcutta and goes to work in a mine.  He occasionally sends money for his son to Aparna’s family in Khulna but cannot bring himself to see the child, whose life he blames for his wife’s death.  Kajal, who lives with his grandfather, is undisciplined (on his first appearance, we see his face only after he’s removed a disturbing beast-bird mask).  When Apu returns to Khulna – following a visit and pleading from the now professionally successful but still loyal Pulu – the child at first refuses to speak to him.   Apu, having left Kajal’s grandfather funds for the boy’s education, is leaving when he sees the small figure of his son watching him, following him.  The film ends with Apu marching triumphantly forward through the landscape, carrying Kajal on his shoulders.  Because this final part of The World of Apu is so emotionally tough, the happy ending feels hard won.  I felt that Satyajit Ray had earned it but didn’t fully believe it – because Ray has so convincingly and unsparingly realised Apu’s and Kajal’s feelings for each other.  The accusing eyes of the son who’s been rejected by his father also reflect the father’s resentment of the child.   Surely these feelings, and the scarred early years of Kajal’s childhood, can’t be fully overcome?

    I’m sorry that so much of the detail of The World of Apu was lost on me – through not having seen the first two parts of the trilogy beforehand and through my ignorance of Indian religious mythology and tradition.  When Aparna’s mother first sees Apu she compares him with the god Krishna:  I missed the fact that Krishna, like Apu, is a flute-player.   The absence of any reaction on the part of Aparna’s relatively wealthy family to the news that Apu is without means struck me as an omission but perhaps wouldn’t seem so to a better informed viewer.   Even so, the resonances within the film are clear:  for example, in an early scene Apu walks back home along the railway line and shouts at some pigs that are rooting around to get out of the way; the bereaved Apu stands by the same line contemplating suicide as a train approaches – when the train has passed it’s revealed that a pig has been hit by it.   The hoots of the trains and the notes of Apu’s flute mingle expressively, and the score by Ravi Shankar heightens the emotions of the story without overpowering it.   Images like the men labelling vials in the pharmaceutical factory, one of them meeting Apu’s eyes as he watches in dismay, are extraordinarily succinct and powerful.   Soumitra Chatterjee, who featured in many later Ray films and remains a leading figure in Indian film culture, has a wonderfully animated face and his characterisation is richly layered:  he’s unusually skilled at suggesting someone thinking hard and deep.   Sharmila Tagore, who has also enjoyed enduring success as an actress, was only fourteen years old when she played Aparna.  You can sense her tentativeness but she is naturally expressive and humorous.  Swapan Mukherjee is Pulu and Alok Chakravarty is Kajal.  Ray’s screenplay was adapted, like the second part of Aparajito, from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel of the same name.

    27 August 2013

    [1] Afternote:  Fast forward nine years … I saw Pather Panchali and Aparajito at BFI’s retrospective to mark (slightly belatedly) the centenary of Satyajit Ray’s birth.

  • Steve Jobs

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Danny Boyle (2015)

    The top left-hand side of the theatrical release poster for Steve Jobs includes the film’s title and the names of the main actors, the director and the screenwriter.  In the bottom right-hand corner is Michael Fassbender as Jobs, shown in sideview and from just below the waist.  A small, distant figure in jeans and a black rollneck sweater, he looks deep in thought.   In between the words and this image is white space, which occupies most of the poster.  Although this isn’t conventionally appealing, the self-confidence needed to eschew conventional appeal makes the poster rather impressive; besides, the streamlined monochrome look is coherent with Apple design and with how you see the real Steve Jobs in your mind’s eye.  The hi-tech world realised in Danny Boyle’s film – which features sleek production design (Guy Hendrix Dyas) and slick editing (Elliot Graham) – complements Aaron Sorkin’s structurally distinctive screenplay.  The source material is Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography, published very shortly after its subject’s death in 2011, but Steve Jobs, as adapted by Sorkin, is essentially a three-act theatre play, with a predominantly backstage setting.   Each act focuses on the minutes leading up to the official launch of a famous Jobs product:  the Apple Macintosh in 1984; the NeXT Computer in 1988; the iMac in 1998.  (Boyle and Sorkin work only a few flashbacks into the narrative.)  The tension of the launch, in all three cases, is increased when, as Jobs prepares to go on stage, recurring dramatis personae appear, to pose awkward questions and deliver uncomfortable home truths.  The behind-closed-doors ambience is reinforced by there being only two external sequences in the whole film – one of these very near the end, out on the roof of the building within which the iMac is about to be unveiled.

    It sounds intriguing yet Steve Jobs is disappointing.  The disappointment sets in quickly because it’s soon clear that the style and structure of the narrative aren’t going to change, and how Boyle and Sorkin see their control-freak protagonist.  (This $30m movie is proving a commercial disappointment too:  over a month after its US release, box-office receipts have just inched past the $20m mark.)  Reviewing David Fincher’s Gone Girl last year, Anthony Lane compared the film unfavourably with the same director’s The Social Network and asked the tongue-in-cheek question, ‘Who could have predicted that a film about murder, betrayal, and deception would be less exciting than a film about a Web site?’  Aaron Sorkin, as the writer of The Social Network, might seem the ideal person to dramatise the life of another IT pioneer but Steve Jobs, in spite of its striking look and superficially daring structure, is located in biopic territory that feels more familiar than the Mark Zuckerberg story.  The two movies have some apparently common elements.  Steve Jobs’s treatment of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) – the nerd Jobs leaves behind – recalls Zuckerberg’s treatment of Eduardo Saverin.  But the relationship of Jobs and Wozniak, largely because of the way the latter keeps turning up as a conscience-pricking thorn in the side of Jobs, plays out mechanically.  Also mechanical (and phony) is how easily the various Jobs’ discomforters are able to penetrate his guard.  They include, as well as Wozniak, the Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels); Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), a member of the original Mac development team; Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), with whom Jobs lived and had a child; and their daughter, Lisa (played, at different ages, by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine).  The marketing executive Joanna Hoffmann (Kate Winslet) has a somewhat different function.  Continuously loyal to Jobs, Joanna is an exasperated, chiding-but-protective Jewish-mother figure – although she’s no older than her impulsive, autocratic boss.  Like him, she’s very loquacious.  The relentless verbal sparring in The Social Network was persuasively character-based but that’s true only to a limited extent in Steve Jobs.  In the early stages, you can believe the main man keeps talking because he’s a highly competitive individual and in order to stay ahead of the demons he has on his tail.  But, then, everyone keeps talking.  After a while, you feel it’s Aaron Sorkin rather than any of the people on the screen who’s determined always to have the last word.

    Danny Boyle starts proceedings with a bit of news film, an excerpt from a black-and-white television interview with Arthur C Clarke, who predicts life in the computer age at the start of the twenty-first century.  The appearance of a famous science-fiction writer in a preface to the film’s world of science fact is an effective touch but, while there’s plenty of talk about the various Apple products in the course of Steve Jobs, the IT theme is oddly superficial.  I happened to see Steve Jobs and Taxi on the same afternoon, in that order.  Jafar Panahi’s film – and the ubiquity of iPads and iPhones in present-day Tehran – helped put the subject of Boyle’s film in a rather different light.  No doubt Boyle and Sorkin were sensitive to the fact that, in the four years since Jobs’s death, there had already been several documentaries made about him, as well as the biopic Jobs (2013), but the movie’s shallow coverage of his work tends to muffle the special significance of his achievement.  Jobs is keen to compare himself with ‘artists’ (his – or, at least, Aaron Sorkin’s – word), including Einstein, Picasso and Bob Dylan.  His doing so comes across as arrogant less because of what Steve Jobs actually created than because he’s presented here as a figure in a generic price-of-fame story.   The explanation of his screwed-up personality is similarly familiar.  Jobs was raised by adoptive parents; according to the film-makers, his rejection not only by his biological mother but also by the first-choice adoptive couple continued to eat away at him.   As if to get his own back, he wants to deny close relationships.  He’s contemptuous of Chrisann and, in the 1984 section, is still denying paternity of Lisa.  He consistently refuses to give Steve Wozniak, with whom Jobs gave birth to Apple, what Wozniak sees as his due.   You wouldn’t guess from Steve Jobs that, by the time of the 1998 third act, Jobs was married and the father of three more children (his marriage to Laurene Powell lasted from 1991 until his death twenty years later).  Boyle and Sorkin are determined to present Jobs as unfavourably as possible:  they accentuate the negative in his personal life; they skimp on what he achieved in his work.  You get little sense of what made Jobs a global entrepreneur.  The film weakly implies that he made billions because he was a bastard.  It then doesn’t allow him even to be a world-class bastard.

    Michael Fassbender’s portrait of Steve Jobs doesn’t help matters – a function of the actor’s emerging screen persona rather than lack of sympathy with the character he’s playing.  In the first few minutes of the film, Fassbender’s deft, crisp delivery of his lines is almost elating – even as you’re aware that the pleasure you’re feeling is largely relief, after his heavy-going yet hollow playing of Macbeth.  Throughout, Fassbender uses his lean body and alertness to express, convincingly, the intelligence of a man who thinks and speaks quickly, often in order to avoid thinking deeply.  I found Fassbender, as usual, interesting to watch but I do wonder if his characteristic coolness makes him too chilly and remote to carry the kind of superior popular movie that Steve Jobs aimed to be – and if he’s a main reason why the film has missed its box-office target.  (I hope I’m wrong in saying this but his work in Jane Eyre and Shame in 2011 remains by some way Fassbender’s best to date in main roles.  It may be no coincidence that Rochester is a leading man sui generis – it’s Jane with whom the audience is meant to connect – and that Brandon in Shame is conceived as an absorbing case study rather than an engaging personality.)  In Steve Jobs, Fassbender is hardly unique in giving the impression of a highly skilled actor going through the motions – it’s just that, because he has the leading role, it matters most in his case.  All the main players are good (Jeff Daniels especially so) and you sense their enthusiasm for Sorkin’s rapid-fire, relentlessly witty dialogue.  Yet everyone seems to be delivering an accomplished turn – the performances leave no trace.   As for Danny Boyle, we already know – from Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours and, more positively, the London Olympics opening ceremony – that he’s a whiz at putting on a show.  Steve Jobs sheds no light on whether he can do more.

    17 November 2015

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