Even the Bollywood blockbuster ‘Mother India’ came later. Ray, probably, was the first to make a realistic rural movie. (I am sure this is true of directors in most Indian languages.) Why isn’t their work as acclaimed as Ray’s? Why didn’t they win the Golden Lion, for example? When I think about it, the explanation I can come up with, is this one. Others Tamil directors like Mahendran, Balumahendra, Bhagyaraj and Sridhar made some beautiful rural movies too. Bharathiraja made movies exploring rural themes for more than a decade. The reason I thought of this was because I have seen many Tamil movies, which came out in the ’70s and ’80s which had a similar theme.
#Watch pather panchali movie#
The ending of the movie is sad but there is also room for future happiness and adventures.Īfter watching ‘ Pather Panchali‘, I wondered why it is regarded as a great work and why it established Satyajit Ray’s reputation. The acting by all the actors and actresses is understated and realistic. This old woman is beautiful, like the painting by Albrecht Dürer of his mother. Ray makes sure that this old woman looks old, instead of dressing her well and making her look like a matriarch. My favourite characters in the story were Durga, the daughter of the couple, Durga’s mother, and the old woman who lives in their place. There is minimalism everywhere though – dialogue is there only if required, most of the movie doesn’t have music and we hear only natural sounds, but when music makes its appearance, Pandit Ravi Shankar’s composition evokes magic. A little bit of that is there but Ray is careful not to extend it to European lengths. Because Ray was a student of Renoir, I was expecting the European thing in the movie – the camera showing water dripping from the roof for a long time, or the rain falling or the wind blowing or the sound of footsteps, with nothing happening in the story. But it takes a lot of courage to buck the trend and make a movie which showed things as they are, in contrast to Bollywood of that time which depicted people living in villas and having affairs and flying planes and having a ranch filled with horses – the kind of life most people never lived. So, I doubt that this movie would have had a lot of mainstream fans when it first came out.
I have heard oldtimers say that they went to the theatre to watch escapist movies and loved to watch the hero and the heroine dancing around a tree, and their real life was hard and they didn’t want to watch that on the screen too. I don’t know whether it made money in the box office – probably not. During the time when Ray’s popular Bollywood counterpart Raj Kapoor was playing the role of the charming, loveable rogue and dancing around in villages singing prescriptive songs and trying to walk like Charlie Chaplin, Ray’s first movie must have been stark with its realism. How people find happiness in small things, how they inflict small cruelties on each other, how mothers expect daughters to be responsible but shower affection on their sons, how neighbours fight with each other but also show kindness towards each other, the affection kids and old people have for each other – all these are beautifully and realistically depicted. I loved the realistic way rural life in India is depicted in the movie. You should watch the movie to find out more. And the family, whose everyday life is challenging, goes through tough times.
Then one day the husband leaves for another town to find a job. The story continues as we follow the adventures of the girl and her younger brother as they play in the woods nearby, go to their neighbour’s homes, talk to the old woman, get sweets from the sweet vendor, cross the fields and see a train for the first time, enjoy getting wet in the rains. Then the wife becomes pregnant and the couple have a son. But they find happiness in the small things. They are always short of money and the husband doesn’t have a steady income. In a small village in Bengal lives a family, a couple and their daughter. The story told in ‘ Pather Panchali‘ goes like this. Finally, I got to watch this classic today. I have wanted to watch Satyajit Ray’s ‘ Pather Panchali‘ (‘Song of the Road’) for a long time now.
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