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Staring: Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee, Dhiresh Majumdar
Director: Satyajit Ray
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Product Details
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786304104293
Format: Black & White, NTSC
ISBN: 6304104294
Label: Sony Pictures
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Sony Pictures
Release Date: 1996-08-13
Running Time: 105
Studio: Sony Pictures
Theatrical Release Date: 1960-10-04

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Editorial Review
Amazon.com
If you ever feel like you've got it tough, watch the Apu trilogy by Satyajit Ray. The World of Apu is the third story in Ray's magnum opus. And yes... things can get worse for our hero, Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee). By now it's the early 1930s, and Apu is a grown man. A dreamer and a writer like his long-dead father, Apu is working on a novel about his life.

When his best friend Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee) asks him to his sister's wedding, Apu has no idea that he'll be the one going home with the bride. Poor Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) is betrothed to an insane man and when his illness becomes apparent, the wedding is cancelled. But Aparna will be cursed unless another bridegroom is found. Apu, in a weak moment, agrees to marry Aparna in return for a job.

Then the unexpected happens. Aparna and Apu fall deeply in love. But will it last? Knowing Apu's luck in the past, the obvious answer is "no," and when Aparna dies in childbirth, Apu is left hating his son, Kajal. Finally, driven by guilt, Apu approaches his son, five years after the death of his beloved wife. Will they be able to salvage some happiness in an already too bleak life? You won't be disappointed in the outcome.

This last installment will leave you wishing Ray had made Apu IV. The music is by Ravi Shankar. --Luanne Brown

Customer Reviews

The Indian Culture Will Sweep You Away!, 2006-12-15
Thanks to a pristine Indian audience, Satyrajit Ray (1921-92) created a trilogy where a ballet-like adagio becomes an art. In this, the 1959 epilogue of our hero Apu's coming of age, Apu is swept away by misfortune, and allows ethical decisions to be made for him. Perhaps paralleling the pacifist role India has played throughout her long life, Apu permits himself to become betrothed to a woman whose fiance is unfit for marriage. Apu steps in and accepts the challenge. Why not? He is at a standstill in his writing career and feels like a poverty-stricken failure with a beautiful face.

His new bride is not only sublimely gorgeous, with those big eyes the filmmaker Ray lovingly caresses, but she comes from incomparable wealth. Their arranged marriage becomes a temple of love, told tenderly with nary a touch between them. Echoing their temporary paradise the camera lingers on grassy landscapes of rural India, while Ravi Shankar's haunting sitar music flows in the background.

In the final scene, the couple's son, a 5-year-old, as playful, mischievous (he throws rocks) and inquisitive as his own father, rides Apu's shoulders in victory. Triumph shines over the appalling take-us-by surprise tragedies that pierce the film. The joyful moment of father and son striding confidently into the Big City reinforces the name and motif of the trilogy: The Unvanquished.

fantastic film!, 2007-03-22
THE WORLD OF APU is the third in the "Apu Trilogy," by the late, great Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray.
This film follows the title character, Apu, as a young, un-employed writer (Soumitra Chatterjee), who is searching for work, all the while aspiring to write his first novel. Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee), Apu's best friend from secondary school, has a beautiful young cousin, Aparna (Shamila Tagore), who is engaged to be married. Pulu invites Apu to attend the wedding, only to discover the day of the ceremony that the groom is a madman. Apu is asked to marry the bride, since the wedding day is auspicious and if she doesn't get married at the decided day and time, she is destined to have a life filled with bad luck and unhappiness. Though Apu has never even been in a relationship with a woman, he agrees to marry Aparna to do (as he says) "the honorable thing."

This film takes a look at Apu, his life's struggles and hard deck of cards that life has cast his way. I don't want to ruin the plot details, so I won't elaborate. I will say that the performances are beautiful and the story is wonderfully told. It is at once heartbreaking and inspiring. Highly reccomended......

Excellent, 2010-08-26
Apur Sansar is a film that delights in little things. In the beginning of the film Apu's apartment is a disheveled mess, like most bachelors'. But, within a few scenes of her appearance there, Aparna transforms it into a place where a woman calls home, by subtle decor. Yet, Ray never calls attention to this. It just happens naturally, and only an astute observer would notice; such as a scene where he is teaching her English, because that is the language that allows Bengalis to escape poverty. At other times, he lets romantic intimacy lead one to a change in Apu: there is a deft scene where Apu finds a hairpin between pillows, and then he sees his wife doing cleaning in a hallway, and tries to light a cigarette, only to find a note from her inside his cigarette pack stating that he promised to only smoke after eating. Later, a series of playful letters are exchange between the separated couple, when she is off to her parents' place to give birth. One can sense the delight and excitement Apu gets just from reading the words of his wife, even when interrupted by a co-worker or a man on a trolley. I doubt I've ever seen onscreen love portrayed so well without any physical affection nor intercourse shown. Yet this is just an extension of the great human interactions Ray captures. Earlier, in the first sequence with Pulu, we get a sense of the depth of their friendship when, after a night on the town, the two men are returning to Apu's apartment and walking along train tracks at night. They are arguing over women, literature, and the camera just pulls back and leaves the two friends in the midst of their personal comity. Then, after Aparna has died, and Apu is bedridden with grief, Apu is seemingly brought back to reality by the screech of a train whistle- the very thing that, within the bounds of the trilogy, symbolize some greater horizon for him. Yet, we soon see that it is not a call to life that has roused him, but he seems to now be standing on tracks, waiting to be run over, until we learn that the wail we hear, when the camera moves up and away from Apu (as if to let his end come without voyeurism, and foreshadowing a similar scene of pain heard on a payphone in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, where the camera looks away from the protagonist who is being dismissed on the phone, by a woman he desires), is that from a pig whose leg has been crushed, not Apu. Such cinematic poesy and mastery are grace notes that abound in Apur Sansar, and make it such a fabulous work of art; and one with many more moments of insight and depth than these few herein described..

Oftentimes critics confuse the terms major and great, as if they were synonyms. They are not. There are great works of art that are small chamber pieces: think Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, Ingmar Bergman's The Silence, or Curse Of The Cat People. These films are gems, but contain large pieces of cosmic power in their small delineations. Then there are major films, that, while having good moments, and dealing with titanic dilemmas, miss greatness because they do not core deeply enough into things, despite their impact on the culture and their medium: think Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, or Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows. Then there are films that are both great and major, for they are technically, aesthetically, and intellectually great while having a major impact on the culture and cinema. These would be films like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho The Bailiff, and Taxi Driver. Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy- as a whole, or taken in bits, belongs to both classes.

Apur Sansar not only has meaning, but imparts meaning to its viewers, not just of its own internal realities, but those which communicate individually to the percipient. Only humans can bring or gift meaning, for only we can comprehend it. The greatest of artists know this; yet, paradoxically, because it can be so difficult, so few even try to impart it in what they claim as their art. Satyajit Ray had no such worries, and one only wishes more filmmakers followed his lead, one which Apur Sansur so splendidly embodies.

Emotionally strong and eloquent movie, 2006-03-14

The third and final installment of Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, it's about a young idealistic man who learns about reality and responsibility. Apu is a writer living (and starving) in Calcutta. With a friend he attends a wedding, but when the bridegroom goes insane, the wedding is called off. Apu, thinking he's doing a noble deed, marries the girl. Things between them look dubious at first, but they grow to love each other very much. When she dies in childbirth he sinks into deep depression and spends five years wandering around India like a hermit. But he has a son and though he thinks of abandoning him, he comes home finally to raise him. It's a very touching and moving film, and in it's quiet way, very emotional. Soumitra Chatterji is wonderful as Apu, and Sharmila Tagore is openly expressive as his wife. Seeing Apu with his son on his shoulders at the end of the movie is powerfully uplifting. One of the great movies in world cinema.

The final experience!, 2006-06-22
The last Opus of Satyajit Ray conforms together with the other two entries, a memorable and historical achievement in cinema `s story. Satyajit' s clever employment of the camera as a vehicle to express unsaid expressions, feelings and inner motivations is simply inimitable.

We are in front of one of the truest giants of this art, so mischievously used roughly in the actuality. Specially if we take into account the herald in what concerns to the expressive possibilities of the camera as an eye to scrutinize emotions or livings, was precisely, forgotten Titan, the unforgettable D.W. Griffith, one of filmmakers who influenced with major punch to Ray in his early youth.

After having lost his mother, Apu must undertake by himself, the demanded journey, he leaves his town and to make his dreams come true. But as we know, the life has by far a bigger imagination than us, and a apparently good action in order to avoid a familiar disgrace, he will open the great gate of the experience.

Plenty of poetic images, ravishing landscapes and a very touching script, Apu at last will understand what books can not offer; the experience by itself, and that will be a very rewarding living lesson.

If you really love the cinema, you should try to get this Trilogy, because these three films are included in any prestigious list of expert connoisseurs and specialized critics.

An authentic landmark.

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