Duvidha (1973)

 

Director: Mani Kaul

Based on a story by Vijayadan Detha

Cast: Ravi Menon as the Merchant's Son; Raisa Padamsee as the Bride

Ephemeral Waves

[Major Spoilers Throughout]

A stark film in creation, Mani Kaul's film exists in a time in an unknown past. A young bride (Raisa Padamsee) is married to a merchant family more obsessed with money than anything else, her husband (Ravi Menon) to immediately leave her for five years before the honeymoon has finished to work in the town. There is a ghost however near her new home, in a fruit tree. He falls for her immediately, disguising himself to her as the husband but nobly admitting the truth to not deceive her. Their relationship complicates things, as the husband's family presumes he is their son and she becomes expectant of child.

Duvidha is very simple as a narrative. Only under eighty minutes, this is a folk story in tone but very much of a perspective meant to challenge. The ghost is more sympathetic as the plot goes on, but the young bride is inherently the one true person of sympathy, even as the story naturally takes on its pre-cinema storytelling roots with a shepherd the right person to decide the conundrum of two husbands, all done by tricking one into going into a leather water bag out of a series of tests and leading them to being cast in a well. The ending in the end is ultimately bleak. The wife is stuck in a loveless marriage, of money and status, trapped and becoming the perfect figure on the outside to her new family as the narrator describes but felt as a soulless compromise from true happiness. Pointedly this film finds itself caught between two movements at this point in Indian cinema - the traditional "Bollywood" films and "Parallel cinema", which were social realistic work which challenges the issues and ideals of the nation. Duvidha takes influences from Parallel cinema in its critique but defies by its supernatural narrative, its own unique film as a result.

Here, the ghost is not the trespasser as in other tales, instead a believer of true passionate love whether his was the moral way to go or not, whilst the family are disconnected from emotion. Whether that ghost is ethical to have done what he has done, as already mentioned, is as much in mind to he being a metaphor and that, either way, Padamsee's lead is still the one trapped in a cold place. As she states, she was pushed out her family house quickly after adolescence unlike boys, and forced into a strict life. Any further attempt to add layers in reading is pointless when the tale itself is the meaning.

Where Duvidha is radical is how it is made. A stark, muted colour palette is immediate. Set in the countryside, even extravagance and colour are deeper in a dirtier form. Clothes look worn or at least lived in, the makeup on Padamsee harsher if adding still an aura, red and oranges by themselves darker. It is naturalism pushed to the point of an unnatural tone, the image (as a film preserved into the later decades) grainy and with objects like fruit more tangible in a woman's hands as the world around her is starker. Amidst this world, of an almost barren desert-like atmosphere and the men almost all wearing white which part of the bare chest exposed, worn in look, adds a great deal to the tone as clearly shows as well an influence from art. Also of note is that parts of Duvidha are shot as still images alongside the moving ones and even a few which change, the result altogether stark and stripping away artifice even if the film itself is a folktale. The soundtrack too, with dialogue not spoke by the actors onscreen by dubbed later at times, and the music intermittent, adds a dividing line between the viewer and the material. Altogether, the film is a compelling piece, unique in its own context without however being a difficult work to grasp. It instead has something distinct in its different sides connecting this well.