Apur Panchali - A Preview

Director: Kaushik Ganguly
Starring: Parambrata Chatterjee, Parno Mitra
Music by: Indradeep Dasgupta
Releasing: April 25, 2014

Okay, so I'm pretty excited about this film. I know I wouldn't be able to watch it until it is on youtube or netflix.. but I'm excited, anyway.


Synopsis:

We all know about the  Satyajit Ray classic "Pother Panchali" . This film is about the child actor's "Apu" or Subir Banerjee's life. Parambrata plays a younger Subir in the movie and Parno Mitra plays his wife.

Subir Banerjee was lost in oblivion soon after the iconic Ray movie and had never been a part of any other movie.  He lived a "chaposha" middle class life, worked in a a mill. Then, he worked as a clerk in Central Government and is currently retired.

Kaushik Ganguly  accidentally discovered Subir  few years back and was intrigued that Subir, never appeared on the silver screen again. Apparently at first Subir wasn't even ready to admit that he had acted in the role of Apu. Eventually however, they connected and Kaushik expressed his interest in doing a film on his life Subir eventually agreed and the rest is history. The movie fetched this talented director a Best Director award at 44th  International Film Festival of India. Pretty Impressive!

However, Wikipedia tells me that  India Today, had tracked down the child actor in 1980, about 30 years after the film was released and published an article on the child actor. But that neither reignited Subir's passion for films nor did it inspire anyone to make a film on it, it just got lost!




Trailor, Poster and Interviews : My Inference

The trailor starts of with this young man trying to track down "Apu", set in modern Kolkata. The film is a flash back of Apu's rather Subir's life and it is most probably set in the mid -late 70s. The flash back is black and white (classic!!) there is a hint of Nokshal andolon in there. There is also an inkling of a solid Bengali romance - they keep flipping back and forth between pictures of Parambrata/ Parno and Soumitra/Sharmila.

Parambrata is going to be fantastic, I can tell.What? Biased you say? Not one bit! I just happen to be one of Parambrata's biggest fan of all time, that's all!
Parno is the actress who portrayed the character of "Sunny", the tom boy from the film that is my blog's namesake " Maach, Mishti, more. She actually looks pretty good in this completely new avatar, but I doubt she is going to be have a lot of screen time or impact in the movie, no offense to Parno offcourse. I just think that that script being Subir centric, there will not be a lot of emphasis on Subir's lady love. Actually the fact that they say that there are similarities between reel and real Apu, makes me nervous of an untimely death of Parno's character. Or, I could be totally wrong and maybe this death has a profound impact on Subir's life and it changes how he sees the world?

I smell a hint of satire or rather irony -  the man who was part of a movie that changed Bengali move forever, was a one cinema wonder!

Finally it is a tribute to all the lost child actors that were part of cinema that changed the world. (It says right in the trailer).

I can't wait to find out what it is all about.

This movie is going to tug at our heart strings and make us cry!

P.S. There is only one song that has surfaced " Apur Payer Chap", by Arijit Singh. Wonderful song, very calming.