Review of Apur Sansar (1959) by Kj P — 26 Dec 2013

All in all, this film is the weakest of the trilogy, but that's not such a bad thing, given that the first two are brilliant.The problem with this film is that the thinness of Apu's character comes out a bit too much.

The best-drawn characters in all three films are the women (sister, mother, wife), and as this film focuses primarily on Apu himself, the richness of the earlier films is lost. The wife in this film is wonderful and is married to Apu at the same time his sister dies in Pather Panchali.

Accordingly, the interactions between Apu (whose development is pretty obviously arrested by the fact that everyone close to him has died) and his wife have the same tenderness and beauty of the interactions between Apu and Durga in the first film, and Apu and his mother in the second.

When I call this film the weakest of the three, I refer primarily to the script and the acting. To be sure, it is a rather unsatisfactory conclusion to the trilogy insofar as this third film seems disconnected from the first two (this might just be because no actors carry over).

For all this, though, the film is worth seeing merely for Ray's directorial ability which is perhaps strongest in Aparajito but is every bit as present here.