The Kansas City Star from Kansas City, Missouri • 69

1 A huies opens exceptional film series Satyajit debut film is first of nine and a real wonder By ROBERT BUTLER Movie Editor How it rates a drama is unrated and contains no objectionable material Running time is 2 hours 3 minutes Bengali with English subtitles Deeply compassionate but utterly devoid of sentiment creeps up on an audience Indian director Satyajit sublime 1955 debut essentially is plotless offering without editorial comment scenes from life in a tiny Bengali village and in particular from the life of the boy Apu whose birth we witness a few minutes after the film begins But little by little masterpiece builds up an immense wealth of detail until by its conclusion we have become a part of this foreign yet oddly familiar world The tragedies and simple joys of its Sony Pictures Subir Banerji plays Apu in Panchali lously withered crone (Chunibala Devi) who survives by freeloading on her relatives Durga even steals fruit for the old lady a practice that puts her mother in constant ho water with their more well-to-do relation who own the local orchard When Father goes off to look for work Mother and the two children are left to survive as best they can although it means a hand-to-mouth existence But even in the midst of hardship there are moments of wonder such as Apu and magical encounter with a steam locomotive their first contact with the much greater modern world outside their narrowly circumscribed environment concludes with one of the most extraordinary evocations of grief ever captured on film a wrenching scene that tears us out of our roles as complacent movie watchers and transforms us into participants family is featured in two sequels and World of which also will be part of this Ray series inhabitants become our own is the first of nine recently restored films by Ray that will be shown over the next eight weeks at the Tivoli at Westport Square Kansas City is only the third city (after New York and Los Angeles) to play host to this collection of late best work and for lovers of movies a major event By Hollywood standards films doer than an observer through whose eyes we experience this world His father (Kanu Baneiji) is an ineffectual dreamer a frustrated playwright and poet whose limitations as a wage-earner leave his family perennially in debt mother (Karuna Baneiji) attempts to deal with hardships with stoicism although she constantly yearns for something better and cannot always conceal her disappointment The most compelling character is Durga (Umas Das Gupta) older sister who is devoted to their aunt a fabu- approach differs from the however in his preoccupation with the natural world and place in it The jungle creeps up to the very edge of Apu's family compound most living is done in the open courtyard and even when its inhabitants are indoors the outdoors makes its presence and power felt a world of beauty (dragonflies dance on a surface seemingly in time to the Ravi Shankar raga of joy on the soundtrack) and of danger as in the monsoon that brings with it terror and death The boy Apu (Subir Baneiji) is less a seem almost anti-dramatic With he was heavily influenced by the work of the Italian neo-realists who cast non-actors in almost documentary studies of proletarian life Restoration project salutes famed countryman from India Ismail Merchant saved works from deterioration loss By ROBERT BUTLER Movie Editor Ray films have earned $500000 which Merchant said was great reassurance that a public for moving soulful intelligent Although hailed as one of the greatest directors Ray was essentially ignored in his own country For starters Ray made his films in the minority Bengali language of 850 million people in India perhaps only 80 million to 100 million speak Bengali" Merchant said made his films for the Bengali audience and especially for middle-class Bengalis and intellectuals So at best his target audience was only 5 million Moreover concise carefully observed studies of Indian life held no allure for his moviegoing masses who always have preferred the escapism of overblown musical comedies and swashbuckling romances even in his own country Ray's films were very badly distributed and poorly Merchant said Several years ago when Ray was incapacitated by the illness that eventually would kill him Merchant began a campaign to honor his countryman That effort culminated with Ray receiving a special Academy Award for lifetime Prawer Jhabvala Merchant has produced such landmark films as Room With a and Remains of the Five years ago the and Mrs was filmed in Kansas City with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward Merchant in the title roles Now three years after Satyajit death Merchant is supervising the restoration and distribution of best films first movie and the first entry in the acclaimed Apu Trilogy opens today at the Tivoli at Westport Square Eight more Ray titles will be shown at the theater in the next two months Kansas City is only the third American city after New York and Los Angeles to show the entire collection Merchant says because KChas an unusually strong audience for art films and because of his friendship with Tivoli owner Jerry Harrington whom he met during the shoot In its LA and New York bookings the Speaking with Ray by telephone after the Oscar ceremony Merchant learned that the negatives of many of films had been so neglected that they were in danger of being lost When Ray died just a few weeks later Merchant decided that he and partner Ivory would distribute films in America Film restoration expert Dick Shepard was sent to India to find the best existing copies of films strike new negatives and create new exhibition prints with digital sound Merchant at first raised money for this effort by to relatives film lovers friends begging and sometimes threatening More money was kicked in by the Merchant Ivory Foundation established five years ago by Merchant and Ivory to support promising artists writers directors and composers and by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The total restoration effort cost $1 million A share of the profits from bookings of the Ray collection will go to the wife and son was an extraordinary artist" Merchant said are few like him He has done things for the human soul that no other director has done His story is the story of the human connection very profound very Although he was bom and reared in India it wasn't until he came to New York as a young man that filmmaker Ismail Merchant finally saw a movie by his countryman Satyajit Ray know his films at all when I was in India" Merchant said in an interview from Paris where he and partner James Ivory are preparing a film about Pablo Picasso encounter work until 1958 when I was in America I went to a Manhattan theater to see the Apu Trilogy and a new world opened up to me grown up on Hollywood movies and popular Indian films but Ray was my great discovery After that I started looking for other directors with special visions: Vittorio de Sica Ingmar Bergman Federico Fellini For me that was the It was the beginning not only of appreciation of film as an art form but also of his own moviemaking career During a 30-year collaboration with director Janies Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Friday June 9 1995 THE KANSAS CITY STAR 3j.