★★★★★ 4
What is the point? (SPOILER)
My heading echoes the adult Apu who, in the last movie in the trilogy says, "What is the use?" and allows the pages of his autobiographical novel to blow away in a wind.
In the first two movies we enter the very real life of a rural Indian family whose members are all lovingly created by director and actors. But their story is rather sad. First Apu's young sister dies of illness, a fate shared much later by their father. Then the life of the mother dwindles away and Apu is left alone. The restoration of the nearly-destroyed films is a technological marvel, but I wondered if this tale would attain to anything of lasting value by the end.
With the third and last movie in this series, I can reach a somewhat different conclusion. There is death and suffering in this last part too as Apu's wife dies early on but the entire narrative reaches a sudden and surprising resolution when Apu unites with his long-abandoned little boy who is himself a mirror of Apu growing up. There is something of a vacuous Asian experience in this cinematic telling but it doesn't really come to nothing as the stereotype might suggest. I recall that experience in David Lean's rendering of E.M.Forster's A Passage to India, a wonderful movie too but, like the novel, lending itself to earlier Western ideas about the East. An element of life, freedom, joy bursts upon us at the end of Ray's movie and transforms everything we have seen before. Yes, life is risky, unpredictable, filled with suffering, but it can still lead to something wonderful.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2018
