Critics reviews

Each frame in the film reflects a seemingly shared state of mind of the very young and the very old—innocence that grabs a hold, understanding that doesn't make too much of itself. Long stretches of wordlessness—as when the two children are trailed by a trotting dog, their mini-convoy reflected upside down in a river—create an environment in which the characters are not contriving anything. They live. They do. They are.

A more pensive work than The Big City, it is the best distillation of Ray's spirit and essence as a filmmaker. Beginning what became known as the Apu trilogy, this poetic and touching film introduces our young protagonist, Apu, in a delightful coming-of-age story set in a Bengali village in the 1920s.

Pather Panchali is generally a story of the loss of innocence, but Ray doesn't structure the scene as a mere sucker punch to the glee and wonder that precedes it. Instead, he places the tragic with the idyllic to grapple with the contradictory nature of life, never ceding fully to any one emotion to better study natural responses to multiple stimuli.

Ray never had a finished script for the movie because, he said, he saw and heard it in his head. Perhaps that accounts for the film's remarkable evenness of rhythm, its mood of sustained contemplation. The story of Pather Panchali is episodic, but it moves forward with the force of a held thought.

The impetus in BICYCLE THIEVES is to find the bicycle; the impetus in PATHER PANCHALI is simply to live. Time, as it is felt in Ray's film, expands and contracts not with breaks but rather a gummy elasticity that reveals both the sufferings caused by the ceaseless march of time and the perpetual chance for rebirth and renewal. Ray's characters, trapped by their economic conditions, brutally compound this effect.

...There was something else to the film that felt entirely new: an immersion in, and respect for, the rhythms of daily life and nature. Gone was the melodrama of the Italians and the literate classicism of Renoir. Watching Pather Panchali, you could have sworn you were watching real life. Indeed, many viewers mistakenly thought they were.

I had seen the trilogy only once, in 16mm back in my graduate-school days. At the time, I admired it but wasn't bowled over. Sitting through the Ritrovato screenings, I found it a profoundly moving and beautiful experience. Satyajit Ray manages both to maintain a quiet, leisurely pace and to compress the hero's life, from birth to early adulthood, into three parts totalling less than six hours.

Ray extends the unlikely scenes, those quotidian ones, giving Pather Panchali a documentary resonance. Scenes such as Indir walking about at her tired, rickety speed for a few minutes of screen time enables the viewer to see and consequently care that her life is fragile, her existence endangered by her physical and emotional strain.

Like Ozu's "Tokyo Story", there's a timeless quality to "Pather Panchali" that's mesmerizing. Without forced melodrama, Apu's family very quickly becomes ours. The primary forces that shape Apu's life are essential to humanity whether they be as primal as hunger or as coveted as the love of family. This is humanity. It will always matter. And Ray's ability to turn that human essence into art shouldn't be underrated.

What Ray knew was good graphic design and the Soviet cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, especially the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. The compositional values of both come to play in the movie's two most celebrated scenes: little Apurba (Subir Banerjee), called "Apu," seeing a train for the first time, as it cuts through the landscape; and the rainstorm sequence, which begins with a close-up of a single drop of water hitting the top of a bald man's head.

Pather Panchali, very simply, is a masterpiece... Events unfold languorously, and nature seems to set the pace—time is marked through rapturous sequences of monsoon rains and the slow deterioration of the family home—though modernity is visible on the periphery.

In effect, the Apu trilogy is a sort of prolegomenon to future cinema, a one-man New Wave in which Ray derives both the self-mythologizing aestheticism and the existential anguish of European modernism from a clear-eyed, unflinching view of his own origins and his homeland. Its apparent neo-realism becomes a triumph of style, its direct observation is an intellectual conquest.