Pather Panchali (1955)

(On Cable TV, October 2019) I understand why Pather Panchali is an important film: Breaking from the dominant tradition of song-and-dance Indian cinema, it chooses to focus on a representation of desperate rural poverty in, helping to launch the parallel cinema movement. Writer-director Satyajit Ray is considered a legend today, and his work in India echoed what was also going on in Europe as cinema tried to propose an alternative to the glossy Hollywood film aesthetics. His work in Pather Panchali is as dramatically effective as any other director, with a gut-punch of an ending that certainly won’t have you thinking about a happy ending. Then there’s the fact that the film presents Indian culture from the inside, without the distancing effect of many western productions (especially at the time) that imposed a filter over the depiction of the country. (See the quasi-contemporary The River, from Jean Renoir, that was closely linked to the production of Pather Panchali.) That’s all fine and good, and I suppose that I can check off one more film from the must-see lists of world cinema. But here’s the thing: I really don’t like neorealism, no matter the country. I like the glossy entertainment that cinema has to offer, and the thought of being stuck for more than two very long hours in desperately poor rural India has me reaching for the escape door, the fast-forward button or any other form of escape. For all of my growing film education, I really don’t like Pather Panchali, don’t want to see it ever again, and am not looking forward to digging deeper in that subgenre to watch similar movies. Part of a film education isn’t only to find out what you like, but also what you don’t.