The first film of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali, was such a great film that, naturally, the second film in the series was bound to suffer a bit of a letdown. Thus, Aparajito (The Unvanquished), based on the novel Aparajita, by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, is not the unadulterated great piece of art that Pather Panchali is. Like many middle films of a series, it suffers from the infamous middle filmitis—when films that are not first in a series rely too heavily upon an audience’s memories of earlier films to inform them of the traits of characters, the chronology of prior events, and a general knowledge of the world the film series is set in.
Aparajito falls into this trap, however, in a way different from your average Hollywood blockbuster film. Whereas most middle films feel a need to fall back on what already passed in a first film, Aparajito spends too much time ignoring the traits and actions that occurred in Pather Panchali; almost as if Ray wanted to sever connections between the two films.
He achieves this by having the film’s lead character, Apu, not being played by the child who portrayed him in the first film, Subir Banerjee. In this film, Apu is first played by Pinaki Sen Gupta, when ten; and later by Smaran Ghosal, when in his late teens. Two of the actors from the first film were retained: Kanu Banerjee as Harihar, Apu’s father, and his wife Sarbajaya is still played by Karuna Banerjee. However, there has been a major personality shift in Sarbajaya, likely the only evidence of the death of Durga, Apu’s older sister, from the first film. Whereas Sarbajaya was bossy and condescending in the first film, while also being loving, in this film she’s timid and lets life play her; whereas in the first film she was restive and dissatisfied with what life brought.
The film opens, still in the unspecified early 20th century (although the film states it is the Bengal year 1327), with Apu’s family getting settled in to an apartment in the city of Benares, near a ghat, or steep set of stairs, that leads down to the Ganges River. Thus, it must be only a few weeks since the events that closed the first film.
Although a few years had passed since the shooting of the first film, the actor who plays Apu (Pinaki Sen Gupta) is clearly a few years older than Subir Banerjee was, so switching actors must have been because the other boy was not available. It is an unfortunate choice since Gupta looks nothing like Banerjee, even down to his Cindy Crawford-like lip mole. Worse, he’s not nearly the actor Banerjee was. His range of expressiveness is virtually nil, whereas Banerjee could convey diverse and complex feelings, quite a feat for a child actor. Midway through the film, when a swift ellipsis brings us forth five or six years, to the time Apu is to enter college, the new actor to portray Apu, Smaran Ghosal, is only marginally better than Gupta. Add to that the fact that Ghosal has an odd facial tic that makes him appear as if he has suffered a stroke, and the choices for the film’s lead are odd, to say the least. That said, the appearance of Ghosal is when the film takes off, narratively and stylistically, despite the actor’s limitations.
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