Wonderful story of a poor family and a adolescent girl I don't even think myself as someone who could write comment on Satyajit Ray's movie. But I have to tell people what I feel about this movie Pathar Panchali. Let me ask you a simple question have you ever been 'moved' emotionally? Well! If you have! Then you know what I am talking about, but you haven't been then I am sure you want try that out. Watch this movie and then you will know.
Pathar Panchali is a very different movie and is not about romance, wealth, beautiful faces, relationships, cars, computers and cellphones. Not about bombs, wars, jails, science, space and fiction or whatever. The movie is the first one in famous Apu Trilogy and is about a poor brahmin family in West Bengal (India). It is an story of a girl in this family, how she grew up among in a poverty stricken family and never had a chance to all things (garland of fake pearls, dolls, candies, bi-scope and hair oil) a girl kid deserves. She grew up a very good girl despite the fact she never went to school. Her brother was born when she was about 5-6 and she loved him a lot. Her plays with her villages girls were very well done. The scenes when one of her friend got married were wonderful and show that how mature she was in her thinking that she is never going to get married was more than a reality. The story captures real moments (hard to describe here!) from a typical poor family in India when (1955) it was not even a decade since India got independence. Poverty was a real issue in India during 1955 and it was Ray's vision to capture it in his movies for generations to see after hundreds of years later what India has come out of today when Bollywood makes $10bn budget movies and they fail to even break-even on box office.
Its amazing that Ray had a vision of making such movies when rest of the country was struggling to survive. These movies are really really low cost movies and are example of pure intellectual work. When I was one of the Italian movie "La Strada" then I thought that perhaps it is the only movie which comes close to Pathar Panchali.
I would say all three movies in Apu Trilogy (Pathar Panchali, Aparajito and Apu Sansar) are great jewels in Indian cinema and they will continue to amaze people for hundreds of years. If you haven't watch them then you will never know what a true will looks likes. It moves you! No kidding! Pathar Panchali is really a best human document ever produced.