Note on Apur sansar

"I had never seen that." Ah, well, I fear the full impact of the scene may not be immediately evident without knowledge of the scenes leading up to it. You see, Apu has been bitter over the fact that his beloved wife Aparna died giving birth to their son, and this has led him to ignore his son for years, who has meanwhile been brought up by the boy's maternal grandfather, whom we see in that clip. Since the death of his wife, Apu has been living a life that is no life, just existing, dead to all emotions beyond his own hurt and bitterness. Finally, Apu's sense of duty, awakened by his best friend Pulu, leads him to see his son for the very first time, simply in order to take the boy off his grandfather's hands. At this point, he plans to take him back to his village to be looked after by others, whilst he himself goes abroad. When Apu turns up and tells Kajal that he is his father, the boy cannot accept it. For how could his real father be this man who just abandoned him for years? Apu begins to realise that he actually loves this wonderful, intelligent, sensitive, and strikingly beautiful child. Slowly, with infinite patience, he tries to win the boy over, but Kajal still finds difficulty in accepting him as his father. Apu's emotional intelligence and sensitivity makes him realise that he cannot just, after all these years of neglect, throw his weight around and take his child by force (as the grandfather suggests). And this is the background to the last scene, in which Apu finally manages to win the affection of the boy, and in doing so finds a new meaning in his own life that had hitherto eluded him. It turns out that, as the Beatles sang, love is all you need. We humans only truly exist in the spaces between us. This is what the atheist Satyajit Ray seems to be saying. Every single word, every gesture, of that scene is perfect. Not a single thing could be altered without detriment to the whole. That is the measure of Satyajit Ray's art. I shall just add that, in my view, to go through life and not view the Apu trilogy at least once is like never becoming acquainted with Shakespeare or Michelangelo. A pity, at any rate. The trilogy has been beautifully restored and has been released by the Criterion Collection on blu-ray!