When I watched Pather Panchali from the S&S list, I mentioned that I’d have to go back someday and watch the rest of the Apu Trilogy, so here we are, with the second of the movies.

Like the first, this is basically a slice-of-life story about this family over a period of years. It starts not long after the first one, with them having moved to Benares (called Varanasi nowadays), and getting along in the big city. Some things happen, they have to move to an uncle’s house, and we time jump a bit to Apu becoming a teenager.

And so a big part of the movie is Apu’s relationship with his mom, where she’s lonely and wants to keep him around in a way that is really not great (“don’t go to school, stay at home with your mom” is probably not ideal advice), and he’s kinda sullen and wants to go off to school in a big city, so you’ve got that tension; and resolving that is basically where the movie ends.

Ultimately, I think this is a less interesting movie than the first one — the emotional beats are more obvious, the events are less realistic and more melodramatic, and its multiple locations mean that it never develops the sense of place that Pather Panchali had. I also wonder if there’s not a bit of “middle book” syndrome going on here, where this is just kind of a connective tissue movie between the first and the third, so it neither feels like a beginning nor an end, really.

And that sounds negative, but I really liked Pather Panchali a lot (and, y’know, it did make that great movies list), so “not as good as that” still leaves a lot of room for a movie to still be pretty good, which this was. I’m not going to jump right into the third one, but I’ll be circling back at some point to finish the trilogy.