Tribute to a child star

By Daniel Nelson

It helps if you’ve seen Satyajit Ray’s cinema classic, Pather Panchali, but even if you haven’t it’s still delightful.

One of the characters in Ray’s film is a small boy, wonderfully played by Subir Bannerjee.

The set-up of Apur Panchali is that, 58 years on, a young film student sets out to find the now forgotten actor, to deliver a letter inviting him to Germany for a ceremony honouring his performance.

Bannerjee is not interested – he doesn’t even want to see the letter.

The student perseveres.

What follows is shown on three levels: sequences from the original film; imagined scenes from Bannerjee’s life, also in black and white; and the awkward, increasingly affectionate conversation and interaction between the two men, in colour.

It’s a gentle and absorbing film about film-making, about what happens to a child star who slips out of public view, and about an ordinary life marked by personal tragedy. It’s also a testament to an aspect of Bengali culture that I am love with - serious, intelligent, quietly humorous, appreciating beauty and idealism but slightly world-weary, rather Chekhovian, and  immersed in books, cinema, socialism and cigarettes (I watched the film on a London Indian Film festival DVD that bore constant “cigarettes are dangerous” messages).

OK, director Kaushik Ganguly isn’t Satyajit Ray, but he’s very good, and so is the acting.

Immensely enjoyable.

·         Apur Panchali (Apu’s Song) is showing at the London Indian Film Festival on 13 July at the BFI Southbank, 3pm, and on 14 July at Cineworld Wembley, 7pm,  + Q&A with director Kaushik Ganguly

 + Also showing at the Festival:

·Bravura Bangladesh independence war adventure

 Girl risks everything for freedom. But there's more to this film than that

·How to make a saintly modern Indian biopic

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