The fiftieth edition of the New Directors/New Films series, co-sponsored by MOMA and Film at Lincoln Center, will take place this year, both in person (at Lincoln Center) and online, from April 28th to May 8th. In honor of the landmark, it will include a free online series of eleven classics from previous years, running from April 16th to 28th. One of the crucial films in the retrospective, “Duvidha” (1973), by the Indian director Mani Kaul, both provides an extraordinary cinematic experience in itself and offers crucial lessons, both aesthetic and practical, to independent filmmakers anywhere—and continues to do so even now.
The film—based on a story by Vijaydan Detha that recounts a Rajasthani folk tale—is a metaphysical love story that, in Kaul’s hands, yields a quietly accusatory political fury. On a young couple’s wedding day, a ghost that inhabits a banyan tree is overcome by the bride’s beauty and lusts furiously after her. In an oxcart that’s bringing the newlyweds to the groom’s family home, he informs her that he will deposit her there and will then leave for a distant town—for five years—to make his fortune. (What’s more, he declares it pointless to consummate the marriage before his return.) After the groom leaves, the ghost, seeing his opportunity, shape-shifts to take on the appearance of the groom and shows up at the family home, making an excuse to the groom’s father for his early return and presenting himself to the bride.
From the start, Kaul’s aesthetic daring is on display in its basic cinematic elements of visual framings and editing, sound design, and dramatic composition; he tells the story with a calmly controlled, imagistic ecstasy. There’s no wedding party to start the action. The bride and groom’s names are never spoken throughout the film. Most of the cinematic weight is placed on tight closeups of the protagonists, and, especially, of the bride, whose expressions vibrate with powerful yet unspoken passion that’s inseparable from the highly inflected angles, and the intricate compositions, with which Kaul films her. The bride’s many-colored, highly decorated veils and headscarves are like scrims that both filter and distill her performance, like elaborate sets for a private theatrical stage of intimate emotional display. When, at her behest, the real groom stops the cart so that she can pick fruit from a low-growing tree, she shows through the tree’s spiky branches—yet even this aesthetic refinement joins with the action to create sharp dramatic emphasis. (With an excessive concern for appearances, the groom says that the fruit, called dhalu, is eaten by peasants and might make them, a merchant family, a subject of mockery.)
When the groom informs the bride of his plan to leave for five years, she does not protest but nonetheless clearly receives the news as a shock. As he bids his wife farewell, he admonishes her to “uphold the honor of the house” and not yield to temptation. When the ghost appears, he knows that, with his disguise, he can have his way with the bride, but, in a display of honor and, even more, of love, he confesses his deceit to her. Shockingly, she welcomes him as her husband, and consummates the “marriage,” with major dramatic consequences. “Duvidha” (which means “Dilemma”) is a story of a woman’s sexual freedom; her choice is a silent yet radical defiance of the prevailing patriarchal order.
The sequence in which the bride embraces the ghost conveys romantic rapture with exquisite nuance and breathtaking stillness. The highly inflected, highly textured, yet spare and fragmentary images—which show more listening than talking, and place great weight on glances and gestures, ornaments and clothing—are joined by an editing scheme as daring as the cinematography. The film’s surprisingly disparate succession of images is bound together by the terse yet complex storytelling by voices on the soundtrack. Along with spoken dialogue, the movie features a voice-over narration and the three protagonists’ interior monologues—centrally, that of the bride, whose free declarations on the soundtrack alone contrast painfully with the voicelessness of her character onscreen. In voice-over, she laments the condition of women in Indian society—“To parents, a daughter is like a weed that must be uprooted,” and subjected (as she is, at age sixteen), with unquestioning obedience, to her “money-mad” husband and his family.
The film’s vision of anguished contrast between officially sanctioned experience and the urgent demands of conscience is dramatized in climactic moments when the bride, whose many closeups have been of her face veiled, her eyes looking down, her presence crowded with ornamental garb, her head tilted downward—gazes frankly and confrontationally into the camera lens. Through aesthetic refinement and empathetic imagination, “Duvidha” turns a documentary-like attention to landscape and architecture, custom and costume, food and artifacts, into a radical subjectivity that’s the movie’s very core. Kaul’s stylistic flourishes warn viewers not to mistake a bowed head for submission, silence for consent, and socially acceptable appearances for lack of the power and will to revolt.
Kaul’s bold challenge to cinematic convention has a practical aspect, which is revealed in accounts of the film’s production. “Duvidha” was financed outside the system by a friend of Kaul’s, the artist Akbar Padamsee. His scant funding provided only amateur equipment: just enough 16-mm. film for one take of everything, and wind-up cameras (the venerable Bolex), which can’t be used to record synch sound; his starkly elaborate approach to dialogue, which is entirely dubbed, is an inventive workaround. (Kaul also had access to an optical printer, and he made free use of it, in scenes adorned with extended freeze-frames and double exposures.) To play the bride, Kaul recruited Padamsee’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Raissa, whose performance is majestically expressive yet subtle to the breaking point. (Raissa, now an art historian, has never appeared in another film.) Such modest resources and demanding conditions are familiar to many independent filmmakers in the United States. But, in recent decades, the indie-world has become a sort of minor leagues en route to Hollywood, and that tempting path has encouraged filmmakers to merely reproduce Hollywood styles and forms on a smaller scale. But only a few American independent directors (such as Josephine Decker and Terence Nance), working hands-on with very low budgets, have displayed a degree of cinematic freedom akin to that of “Duvidha.”
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“Duvidha,” Reviewed: An Indian Independent Film That Contains Lessons for American Directors - The New Yorker
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