Even before The Simpsons, the whole world knew the name Apu. That began with an unprecedented portrait of rural Indian boyhood in Satyajit Ray's 1955 debut Pather Panchali (which won Best Director and Best Picture awards at the very first San Francisco International Film Festival). As is clear from our first proper introduction to the character, when he peeks with one eye out from a blanket and then rises into an embracing closeup, this Apu is enduringly sensitive, observant, and intelligent. For the family into which he's born, poverty is a bane, but education is a priority. Eventually he aspires to be a writer — but fate seems capricious, and life itself seems precarious. In Aparajito (1956), he reaches adolescence and goes away to school; in Apur Sansar (1959), he becomes a father. Any summary is reductive; what makes the films work is the sense they give of accumulating life experience. In his prime Ray offered an oasis of sorts, a comparative quietude among the formal, political, and metaphysical provocations put out by other art-house titans of his time. Here was something fixed lower in the human hierarchy of needs, something gracefully grounded. "No amount of technical polish can make up for artificiality of theme and dishonesty of treatment," Ray once wrote, and since it's not okay to tattoo those words on some people's foreheads against their will, recommending the Apu films will have to suffice. They've aged well because they were made with complete conviction, and it's hard to understate the value they place on human dignity. Don't miss the chance to check them out.
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