Subir Banerjee’s child Apu watches more than he speaks, and gives Pather Panchali much of its curiosity. We rate this single performance highly: it makes childhood absorbing without asking a child to explain himself.
Fi1m perspective
Subir Banerjee is often watching while the other people in Pather Panchali (1955) get on with their lives. As Apu, he needs little dialogue to hold our attention; the interest he takes in what happens around him is enough. Satyajit Ray allows a child’s experience to matter without immediately turning it into a lesson. We recommend the film partly for how readily Banerjee makes us share that curiosity.
Alongside Uma Dasgupta’s Durga, his curiosity gives a loosely plotted film a reason to keep moving. The children have interests of their own, and Ray does not hurry to make each discovery useful to the adults’ story. Kanu Banerjee’s Harihar and Karuna Banerjee’s Sarbajaya have the work of sustaining the household to attend to. We were moved by the children’s pleasure in the village, set beside the exhaustion Karuna Banerjee brings to Sarbajaya. Apu’s freedom to look and wonder matters more with that tiredness nearby.
The film’s loose pace occasionally drifts; asking Banerjee’s watchfulness to carry every quiet stretch would be asking too much. Ray’s part in the performance matters. He allows the children’s pleasure to sit beside the adults’ worries without making either seem less important. That gives Banerjee room to be observant rather than precocious, and keeps the film from depending on how charming we find him. We are allowed to take an interest in what interests Apu.
Banerjee’s reputation rests on this one early role; there is no later body of screen work against which to measure it. We cannot know from it how he might have handled a different character or a different director. The useful comparison is within the film, where the children’s curiosity and the adults’ worries are given equal care. Watch him alongside Dasgupta, and allow the pair of them the time the film asks for.
Biography
Subir Banerjee is an Indian actor best known for playing the child Apu in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955), the first film in the Apu Trilogy. Born in 1946 in Kolkata, he was discovered by the director's wife Bijoya Ray while playing on a neighbouring rooftop and cast after auditions failed to find a suitable boy.
Shooting took place intermittently between 1952 and 1954. Banerjee had no prior acting experience. He did not appear in any further films and later worked in a factory and as a clerk before taking voluntary retirement.
