Synopsis
A newly-married merchant's son is sent away for business. A ghost, who laid eyes on the bride, falls madly in love with her and takes the form of the husband and begins living with her.
Duvidha
Director
Additional Directing
Producer
Writer
Editor
Cinematography
Composers
Sound
Studios
Rupayan Sansthan National Centre for Performing Arts Film Finance Corporation Vision Actions Workshop
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Language
Alternative Title
Two Roads
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I suspect that if you drew a curve from The Color of Pomegranates to Uncle Boonmee, somewhere along the swirls and switchbacks and curlicues you’d flow straight though the heart of Duvidha.
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almost half a century later the challenge laid down by this film's achievements has never been met even halfway.
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How can one expect dreams to last? They are built on quicksand...
I am stunned. Duvidha develops a visual and formal language entirely its own; I've never seen anything like it before.
Kaul uses the camera in such an inventive way and in doing so creates spaces that are incredibly dynamic and unique. He presents a new world of cinematic storytelling---I am baffled that this came out in 1973 and I haven't seen anything like it made since then. This one seems to be operating entirely in its own realm, which is something I haven't sensed in a film since I watched Fei Mu's Confucius. Duvidha is arresting, beautiful, fresh and original. Again, I am stunned.
To my (possibly naive) eye, this is a masterwork. And the saddest ghost story ever committed to film.
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Ghost fiction is the more literally and emotionally haunting horror lore because the hypothetical existence of ghosts simultaneously proves that there is an afterlife but also suggests that it holds less satisfaction and distraction than our own miserable corporeal existences.Duvidha leans into that by presenting a ghost not only eager to obtain any simulacrum of a real, flesh-and-blood life again but possessed of the wisdom of experience to live a tangible life more fully than those of us still on our first go-arounds. Here, a ghost takes the form of a newlywed man who immediately abandons his wife to pursue a fortune in a business scheme that will keep him from home for years. Yet where this man races off…
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An Indian folktale that’s shot like a modern arthouse film. Duvidha enlightens viewers on the life of a young married couple in India (which is a popular scenario within the culture) , and their difficulties when the husband must leave home for a very long time. A spirit visits the wife in the same form of the husband and what ensues is a new found love in the same sort of strange way. Through traditional roles of marriage , the wife’s needs are addressed; her longing for her husband results in a complicated and spiritual temptation. These old fashioned gender roles and the difficulty of distance within a relationship are at the forefront of the lesson of the story. Does…
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watched this with headphones on and windows open while it was cloudy and raining and it was perfect
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One of the most beautiful, poignant ghost films I’ve ever seen. As in The Curse of the Cat People (1944), Portrait of Jennie (1948) and Atlantique (2019), we are made aware of the mortal fact that all we can leave behind are impressions of light, memories, bloody handprints on the page. The freezeframes speak volumes.
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So quiet, graceful and restrained that it's easy to overlook the astonishing formal technique on display - the slow repetitions of human motion mirrored by the deliberate camera, moments seized and frozen in suddenly static shots. So many mesmerising images; the hands picking the fruit, the bride on the swing, the ghostly winds blowing through the trees. Through these images and the way they incorporate light, texture and movement, Duvidha blends myth and reality, the tangible with the intangible, poetically contrasting presence and absence.
Augie calls this "the saddest ghost story ever committed to film", and right now I can hardly disagree, not just for the tale it tells, but for its tender treatment of the heart's needs and its reflections on the place of a woman in rural India. Tragic and haunting.
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1st Mani Kaul
Exquisitely beautiful in its use of both still photography and moving images. It feels faintly similar to La Jeteé in its melding of the two forms and their narratives around a heterosexual romance, yet there's a difference in the use of that combination. While La Jeteé is interested in how romance and memory intermingle, Duvidha is more about the moments of passion. It's telling that the Bride's happiest moments are captured in moving images, whether it's her languidly lying in the ghost's lap or walking around the house with him. When her lover is wrenched from her, she slowly assumes a static quality, first as her real husband paces around their bed and attempts to clear her…
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Duvidha makes its strongest impression during the quiet moments of observation during which we see Lachhi, over a span of like four years (?), discover herself in the absence of her husband and subsequent presence of a ghost who, after one day being stricken by her beauty, takes the form of her merchant spouse while he is away. Kaul plays with time—how we perceive its slow passing—in a way that reminded me a little bit of Tarkovsky, but his aesthetic style is different from the Russian auteur in that he is concerned primarily with facial compositions, conveyed largely through still photography and/or are often obfuscated—in the case of Lachhi and other female characters in the film—by veils.
All fascinating in its…
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Duvidha | The Dilemma | Ghostly passion
A film made from all the colours of the rainbow, Mani Kaul's Duvidha shines the light of a brilliant India through the lens of a newlywed. Based on a classical ghost story, the film moves at a steady pace under the weight of a breathy narration.
A newly married wife forms a bond with a spiritual being while her merchant husband travels in search of their fortune. In a clever attempt to build a connection and lure this beautiful bride, the ghost takes the form of her husband. Sneaky little Casper.
When "real" hubby returns, chaos ensues, and she must make a choice: settle down with her absent love, or stay true to her new otherworldly love.
Duvidha is a gorgeous, dreamy massage of a film that washes over the viewer with its enchanting score and mesmerising colour palette.
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The Criterion Challenge 2022 - 7. 1970s