So this is the third (and obviously final) movie of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy. The first was about Apu as a young boy in his rural village; the second about him as a teen; and the third is him as a young adult, on his own in Kolkata.

So in the context of this trilogy, this is a lot more like the second movie than the first — Pather Panchali was very low-key and naturalistic, with its Italian neorealism influences worn on its sleeve; but Aparajito had a more melodramatic flair to it. Apur Sansar definitely has elements of both realism and melodrama, but when it goes melodramatic, it goes hard at it.

The movie starts with the realism: Apu is poor. Like “three months behind on his rent, and wearing a shirt with holes in it” poor. But he’s very educated, so why not get a job? Well, because he doesn’t want one. He views himself as a brilliantly creative aspiring novelist who shouldn’t be tied down to the grinding tedium of a clerk’s job or whatever. If you’re being generous, this comes off as a kind of dreamy optimism; if you’re being critical, it’s delusional immaturity. The movie, to its credit, doesn’t force an interpretation on you.

So okay, cool, here’s this low-key, naturalistic movie about a young man trying to find his place in the world and figure shit out, got it. But then a school friend of his invites him to a relative’s wedding in the friend’s home village, and here’s where it gets weird.

Because what happens is, the groom (in what’s apparently an arranged marriage) arrives, and is clearly not mentally well. Like “literally eating his hat” level of total disconnect from reality. The mom is all “nope, she is not getting married to this guy,” which seems to annoy the father. (It’s not stated, but presumably the hat-eating guy’s family has money, or else I can’t imagine the motivation for this.)

So okay, the wedding’s off… except that apparently there’s a superstition that if the bride doesn’t get married today, she’ll never be married, and so they desperately need someone to marry her, and oh look, here’s Apu! This feels like a super-transparent plot device straight out of the cheesiest of romance novels, but idk, maybe it’s actually a real thing in this time and place? Anyway, he’s reluctant to get married — see above re not wanting to be tied down with mundane attachments — but doesn’t want to be a complete jerk about it (and plus, it is hinted, is lonely), so marries this complete stranger who oh by the way is played by a 14-year-old actress, so that’s totally super-cool and awesome (though the character is never given an age, and she looks older than fourteen, so I guess the character and actress might differ here). And now that he’s settled down, he tells his friend that he’s going to have to take that clerk job after all.

We then get a kind of montage of married life, and I’m pretty sure that this is supposed to show their relationship blooming and their love developing and all that — this is how other reviewers describe it, and it’s what makes sense for the plot to come — but it’s got some pretty serious Kevin Can Fuck Himself vibes here, with him being all self-pitying and self-absorbed and her doing all the chores and putting on a happy face for him, and crying the one time when she’s left alone with nobody to see.

This right here is the most frustrating part of the movie by a mile, because yes, it’s a movie about Apu — that’s the structure of the whole trilogy — but I really want to see the story of this child bride who was whisked away from her family and her village to live in poverty in the city through her own eyes, rather than just as a plot device for him. Like, his story is a well-trodden “grow up and get more mature” thing, whereas hers — what would that life even be like?

But at any rate, with whatever degree of plausibility, they do fall in love, and it’s clear that they’re smitten with each other, and then she leaves to go stay with her parents to give birth to their first child. Which is where we see our second big melodramatic story element — and our second big fuck-you to the idea of her having any existence other than to be a plot device for Apu — because of course she dies in childbirth, sending him into a fit of despondency.

Cut now to a little boy playing in the woods and stealing food, and it doesn’t take too much imaginative association to remember Apu looking like this in the first movie; but this isn’t Apu, it’s his son. It quickly becomes clear that it’s five years later, and the kid has been living with his late wife’s parents this whole time, and Apu has never once so much as visited.

The friend who first invited Apu to the wedding now tracks him down; it turns out that Apu has spent the last five years being sad and wandering aimlessly from place to place. The friend shames him into coming to see his son, and as soon as they meet, it’s clear that Apu is having another moment of personal growth (though the kid, quite reasonably, has some doubts about Apu), and the two of them heading back to Kolkata together is the happy ending of the movie and the completion of Apu’s young adult growth arc.

And so yeah, the story of this movie just feels artificial. This doesn’t feel like someone’s actual life in a way the first movie plausibly did; this feels like — as in fact it is — an adaptation of a novel, full of contrivances and hyper-dramatic over-reactions and the like. And the romantic relationship at the core of it felt off to a modern eye, even though I’m sure that by the standards of either the 1920s (when the movie was set) or the 1950s (when it was made), it would have seemed unobjectionable and normie.

Beyond the story, the movie is visually striking — watching this, it’s easy to see why cinematographer Subrata Mitra has his reputation. (This is a Blu-ray based on the 4K master that they restored from various sources after a fire damaged the negatives, so it looks probably as good here as it ever has.)

And so I’ve been pretty critical here, but as with Aparajito, “not as good as Pather Panchali” still leaves a lot of room for a movie to be very good. If this were a completely standalone movie in a world where there was no “Apu Trilogy,” I probably wouldn’t be so bothered about the melodramatic story elements — it’s really only the comparison to that first movie that makes them stand out — and lord knows lots of old movies have more egregiously sexist stories. Ultimately, it’s a masterfully made movie that tells a compellingly dramatic coming of age story; if there’s room to wish for the movie to have been something else, there’s also room to appreciate what it is. Highly recommended.