Fade in
We are back in the front verandah where a bundle is changing hands. A wider shot shows that it’s Apu handing over Aparna’s ornaments to her father to meet Kajal’s expenses in boarding school. Says he’ll again request Pulu to help out, until then he’ll be troubled some more.
Bedding roll under his arm, Apu is leaving.
Notice the two bundles, one with ornaments and the larger bedding roll. Both are humbly done and certainly one travelled inside the other. They are luggage of the same person who is himself plainly wrapped and unshaven. Ray is instinctively full of these kinds of subtle threads of connections, formal and thematic. And almost always they are designed to work subconsciously on the audience.
One of the last things that Aparna had spoken with him at the railway station was these ornaments. Not as something of great importance but one among grocer’s unpaid bills and the sweets that a certain Pinki’s mother was going to make for him, when the train was rolling out.
Where is Kajal at this time? We don’t see him but father-in-law’s casual gesture while urging Apu to take him suggests that he is somewhere outside the gate. This is crucial to ensure smoothness when the boy shortly appears following him in the distance.
Equally important, Apu is facing away from the old man when he makes that gesture. Had he been facing him, he would have to look in that direction, perhaps necessitating an insert, before saying he can’t be using force. In which case Apu’s departure perhaps would have to be shown from the boy’s point of view as well. All that has now been avoided.
Apu had arrived early afternoon and now departs at the same time. He came carrying his bedding roll and now carries the same back. He was both met and now sent off from the same verandah, the same angle of view. That in narrative terms is saying he returned the same as he had come, a failure.
For this final scene in the verandah, the camera is at the highest, standing level of the two characters. Earlier it was at a lower, sitting level of the grandfather while Pulu kept standing and a similar lower level when Apu had arrived. This covers, height-wise, the complete range of possibilities which conveys, subtly but surely, that this is the concluding scene at this location and nothing further is to be expected here.
><
Just as he had bent down twice on arrival, to put down the bedding roll and again to touch the elder’s feet, Apu goes through the same motions as he takes leave. When persisted to take the child by force, he says he cannot do that.
“You can’t do anything, I knew it all along,” says grandfather in frustration and moves away. The view stays on the old man in the verandah as music builds up and, at its peak, cuts to finds Apu already a small figure in the distance.
This would be the cinematic equivalent of: “And he was gone!”
When we next resumes on him, we are following Apu in a tracking shot. That should be an equivalent of: “Although he was leaving, a part of him was left behind…”
On an impulse he turns round and does a double take.
There’s a tiny figure in the distance, Kajal for sure, just round the corner from the house. Perplexed if he might be misreading the situation, Apu resumes walking. Sure enough Kajal begins walking too. When he again turns to check, the boy stops as well.
><
This double take effect is happening for the third time in the film, which has through repetition become an idiom for Apur Sansar. The first time was when Apu spotted Murali on his terrace and the second when Pulu returns to the village and the view breaks off from Kajal’s antics to show his arrival by the river.
Aparajito has similar examples of repeated use of a manner to form a style for that film. You’d be surprised how many times in there a character is called from behind to add a further thought to what they had been talking about.
><
As though in a game, Apu returns a few steps to see if Kajal would retreat but he doesn’t. Dressed in a jacket, he too has come to leave it’d seem.
Apu: What do you want Kajal? Want to say something?
Kajal: Where are you going?
Apu: Do you want to come with me?
Kajal: Are you going to Calcutta?
The boy standing with hands in the pocket and legs astride is a given posture and not his own ‘natural’ way of standing. This is a posture of holding out.
Apu: If I go, will you come with me?
Kajal: Will you take me to my father?
Apu: Sure.
The view is successively getting closer to them keeping pace with the convergence in their respective positions.
Kajal: Will my father scold me?
Apu: Why would he scold you Kajal?
The boy looks down, then up again.
Kajal: Won’t he go away leaving me alone?
Apu: Never.
Kajal: Who are you?
Apu: I’m your… friend. Will you come with me?
Just as Kajal stands deciding, grandfather comes calling.
Apu: Come on Kajal.
“Kajla!”, calls the grandfather off screen again.
Kajal: Grandfather will scold me.
Apu: Grandfather wouldn’t know. I’ll not tell grandfather. Come on.
A smile spreads across Kajal’s face and he runs the distance into his father’s arms. The two unite in an embrace.
The old man smiles too, in blessing. He is left holding the toy train as he sees them go.
On his part Apu has found a live toy in his son to live with.
Notice that there is no tail-away shot of the two as they go. It’s a frontal joint close-up with the camera tracking back over both concluding shots. And music.
><
Grandfather calling Kajal as Kajla is a masterstroke. Much like Topshe for Topesh in Ray’s Feluda stories, that’s a nickname of great indulgence. After all his unpleasant associations with the cane and scolding so far, this is the only fond gesture the old man makes to imply a bond of love between blood relations. That redeems the old man from being a pure tyrant that he has not much reason to be.
><
Consider the mise-en-scene of the entire sequence of Apu’s visit to Aparna’s village to take his son.
From the fright of sudden proximity upon waking up, it’s a gradual development of the boy ‘reading’ the stranger over three distinct stages. Through all three, Apu himself grows to be less awkward but the boy is unrelenting. It is when he’s faced with the real prospect of separation from the kindly bearded man that Kajal finally acts as he does.
Script-wise, the three incidents would have to be sufficiently rich and diverse in order to add up to a comprehensive feel. It’s a protecting father, a pampering father and a story teller father played out over outdoor day, indoor day and bedtime night. We have no idea over how many days these efforts were made before Apu gave up. We don’t know where he slept and what may have been the dining formalities, for example.
If a watch has been banished from this village sequence, so has the calendar it’d seem.
><
Notice the ‘geometry’ of the sequence as a whole. After his first look at the father, the boy runs out of the house to the farthest point until stopped. At the end, the boy makes about the same distance to run into the father’s arms. Both scenes have all three characters in play. At the end of first, grandfather returns inside the house. He does the same at the end of the second as well.
><
In spite of their distance—and with strong currents of wind blowing—why should Apu and Kajal talk as though in close up?
Talking across distances began in the film with Apu-Pulu scene in the hills. For the best part there the friends speak to each other from afar but the sound perspective strikes a comfortable mean without the ‘strain’ showing. Next time such a scene comes is in Aparna’s house when Kajal makes a dash outside the gate. At that time there is little dialogue beyond Apu’s showdown with the grandfather, which has an authentic close perspective. Before that the grandfather’s order to Kajal to return is also true to its long shot perspective.
Finally comes the highly ‘mediated’ and stylised dialogue perspective of the Apu-Kajal exchange at the end. This would be Ray’s way of presenting the essential conflict of the situation in the concluding moments of the film. Talking in loaded monosyllables, the father and son are striking a crucial deal settling the terms of their future relationship from their current position of physical distance. Once the deal is struck, the distance disappears and they unite.
><
Notice that there are no servants in the house or a woman attendant who might be managing the boy. That kind of staff support would be essential to run such a household but they have been kept out of frame to enable the three principal characters to resolve the situation uncluttered. The decision is not without risks. It’s the skill with which the departure scene has been handled that we do not notice the indiscretion of allowing the son-in-law of the family to carry his own luggage as he leaves. Going by the reception they received, Pulu and Apu, when they came to attend the wedding, a warm send off at the ferry station was in order. But in doing so the film would gain on realism—rather superficial naturalism—but dilute the intensity of debate between the three polarities. And certainly the audience would get restive; understandably so.
This sparsity too should be counted as another element of stylisation.
><
Aparna’s house being a solitary structure near the river bend, a constantly blowing wind has been integrated in the mise-en-scene. While none of that is in evidence during their first visit, wind becomes a dramatic, visible element during Apu’s visit to take his son. Apart from Apu and Kajal’s disheveled hair and fluttering dresses, even casual women washing at the bank have their saris flying in the air. The same is reinforced by the sound of fluttering pages of a book in the verandah before Apu enters the scene. Before that when Pulu stands talking to the father-in-law, the waves of the river can be heard in the background. And finally it’s a very convincing application of the boatman’s song to be heard with such clarity on the first floor room, once during night and second time during day, wafting across the open landscape.
Interestingly, the wind is at full play during Apu-Kajal exchange at the end but post their union, it goes suddenly missing. As indeed goes missing their disheveled appearance. It’s already more like a well-groomed look of the two and a happily thereafter feel to the film. This cannot be a continuity mistake. We can be sure that Apu will never shave off that beard. Aparna is gone for good from his life and with his son on the shoulders, he has moved on.
><
Father carrying the boy on top is a stand-alone image of the film. Indeed of the trilogy, for Apu himself never got to be so carried by his father. The only other image to pair it off, as pointed out at the time, is Apu and Aparna’s joint close up when they discuss tuition.
><
As Kajal runs into his father’s arms, the music used is the famous tar-shehnai piece from the end of PP when father hands mother the sari he has brought for his dead daughter. The two situations are hardly comparable but the piece belongs to the trilogy and serves as a pure filler for this occasion without in any way recalling the earlier application.
><
What was wrong with Apu’s approach? He got him toys, the boy didn’t want them. He offered to tell stories, the boy didn’t want that either. What was it that won the boy over eventually? In Apu he found a friend. That’s what he had been missing all along. As for Apu, even in Aparna he sought to find a friend. Instead of any kind of hierarchy, the film pleads for friendship in the father-mother-child relationship.
><
I would not be surprised—or rather I would be very surprised—if another father-son masterpiece of the times, Bicycle Thieves, was not playing at the back of Ray’s mind while resolving Apur Sansar. The influence of Rashomon, too, in terms of designing the 3-way dynamics between three generations at the end may not be difficult to read.
Professor Satyajit Ray 