the fact that the poor idiot of a husband had to live his life possesed by a ghost.Thats SO wrong, ideologically, even in the name of all surpassing love, jeez.What WAS amol palekar thinking???Leaves you with a really bad taste in the mouth.
shareThat particular ending was not liked by many people. In the fairy tale the shepherd asks the man who truly loves Lachchi to enter the waterskin. The ghost does truly love her and thus enters the skin. End of story. Now that would have pissed off even more people - a completely unresolved ending, what happens to Kisen and Lachchi?
Let us say Kisen goes back - he and Lachchi obviously would not work as she was with the ghost knowingly. He is not the ghost so could not have entered the water skin and left the ghost to go back to Lachchi. But maybe Amol Palekr could have taken a little time to show us that the ghost and Kisen were coexisting peacefully in one body. Fairy tales have to have a happy ending you know....
<<But maybe Amol Palekr could have taken a little time to show us that the ghost and Kisen were coexisting peacefully in one body.>>
LOL....i wonder how accepting most people would be of letting a ghost rent out thier body with its soul??while all that ghost wanted was to be w/ your wife? Seriously...how much can we suspend our brain if we wanted to buy THAT?
about what happens to kisen and lalachi...well they live UNHAPPILY ever after. it happens you know. The ending of the fairy tale is more realistic, with a situation like that, they CANNOT end up together.I'm generally a complete romantic in that i want my happy endings....but in this case a unhappy ending is better than such a hurried, ill-thought out, trumped up ending. If they really wanted to be together, she should have LEFT town with him.... But then, she is a rajasthani woman living god knows when...so thats not an option either. So he should have stayed in the waterbag...imprisoned for all time. Has a nice tragic ring to it, but hey, its the only thing you can buy.
Jellyb - did you know that Vidyadhan Detha (the writer) had heard this fairy tale as a kid, hated the ending and always wished he could change it? Then he grows up to be a writer, changes the story and it is made into a movie - now that is a fairy tale that should warm your heart, right?
Talking of acceptance, the fact that Lachchi knew the ghost was not her husband, chose to stay and cohabit with him (living in sin and all that you know :-)), was already not fairy tale like. Why does no one talk about that? If it is okay to long term cuckold your husband then it is probably okay for the ghost to take over his body - I mean this is all pretty strange any way, and does not stand up to analysis, but is completely charming if taken at face value. What makes you think that the ghost and kisen's souls were that different? Did the ghost seem like an evil possessor type of soul?
Fun discussion..
you all keep discussing about the fairy tale aspect - is ist possible for a woman to get pregnant by a ghost etc but you forget that a fairy tale has never been simple entertainment. It was always meant to teach us something. I don´t know the real fairy tale ending but it seems to me that this story should teach us not to be overobedient and not to neglect people while chasing after money. I think we shouldn´t discuss Lachchis behaviour - it´s just a symbol for what happens if you behave like Kishan. It´s not meant to be real or likely - it´s all symbols.
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It is alos supposed to symbolize the fact that a woman in that age got to make a choice and pick a man she liked. She was childish (and very young) and probably never thought through the consequences, but she was given a choice by the ghost. He did not merely pretend to be her husband - that is the key to this story.
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<"well if you don't want me, I'll just leave". He was implying an all-or-nothing type of deal.>
What does that mean exactly? That he would stay to entertain her by doing parlor tricks for her? Of course if she did not want him he would leave...
I think one of the key moments of this film is when the ghost tells Lachchi who he really is and lets her make the choice whether she wants to be with him and she starts crying because she has never been asked for her opinion. I think simply the fact that he asked showed how much he respected her and it was the reason why she chose to be with him. The ghost could have deceived her as he did everyone else, but he didn't. He certainly didn't pressure her.
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He was a ghost who loved her, he gave her the choice not an ultimatum. If she did not want him as a husband then would she want him to stay and play patticake with her? I do not get the manipulative thing... You mean he could just say I'll be your friend and stay with her? Get real...
shareI agree, he gave her a choice. Her husband didn't. He just informed her on their wedding night that he'll be leaving home for five years and would not take her with him.
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Yeah I agree with you, SRani--if anything I think that that line of his proves that he in fact is benevolent, since he doesn't want to force himself upon her even though he loves her deeply. Some have also surmised that in the final scene, when it appears that she's talking to Kishan and she's sobbing and unhappy, and "Kishan" (the Ghost pretending to be him, which is my personal view, though you could argue that it's the real guy bobbing to the surface, perhaps about to be submerged again and forever) assumes that the ghost put a spell on her and forced her, and Lachchi says that she made her choice and wanted to be with him, this could have been the Ghost's way of asking this question again--i.e. of being sure that she still wants him, because if she doesn't then he's willing once again to leave. You could also look at it as him just making the whole thing kind of dramatic and funny in retrospect...either way is fine by me. (You could also, of course, argue again that this is the real Kishan having his final say, or the first of many sporadic and extreme says before the Ghost shows up again. Between these I prefer the "final say" idea.)
shareI also just thought that is the Ghost is using this final question to test her, it's possible that this is an even greater sacrifice on his part--because I'm not sure on this, but I think it's possible, at least, that his decision to enter Kishan's body is irrevocable and has made him human. So he's willing to live forever submerged in someone else's body if that's what she wants. That is, of course, what she does not want, so instead that becomes Kishan's fate. Though, again, I'm not sure that this is as evil or horrible as one might make it out to be.
shareDid you expect the ghost to ask her out on a date?
shareOoooh, that's cool--I hadn't thought of that part about the skin. You could then say that the real "skin" here is Kishan's own skin, which the ghost does finally enter. It is nice to think that the ghost and Kishan were coexisting peacefully, as you say, but I don't think much of Kishan remains to the eye even then, since at the end it really looks like just the ghost is there and Lachchi is obviously thrilled. Though I do think that some fairytales actually have pretty brutal endings, heheh. Anyhow, I actually just wrote two pretty long replies on this in another thread, this one:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0451850/board/thread/65890363
It's nice to find people who are thinking about this as well. :)
Well stop talking about infidelity crap or this having a body possessed by a ghost. The most important is that it ends happily she has a loving husband and a good father for her child. That is important- she is happy, nothing else matters actually. What would be the point of her life if she was to live unhappily till the end of her life? I would choose the ghost( and this stupid thing about ghost getting her pregnant? He had a corporal body so what's the issue? ).
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As opposed to living unhappily ever after. The man was still alive - did you see a dead body somewhere? He and the ghost were co-existing.
'A wed wose, how womantic'
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Shweta - we finally find a point of agreement and you have said in an excellent way all that I was thinking but unable to articulate.
The original folk tale is about the shepherd and how smart he is. He is presented with the two forms and uses his questions to figure out who the real groom is. The ghost is trapped in a water-skin and the story ends. I have heard that Vidyadhan Detha heard this story as a kid and was unhappy with what this resolution meant for the woman and the ghost/husband. So he rewrote the story with this new ending. The film provides insight into a woman's heart and the choices she can make if given the opportunity - sadly not many women are presented with such opportunities even today.
'A wed wose, how womantic'
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No, the guy was left out in the middle of the desert in a bag or something. Not likely he lived.....
Who was in the bag? The ghost entered the bag, the husband was a human and could not have. Agree or not, but I do not think you even understood what was going on.
'A wed wose, how womantic'
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Do you really think it was the husband in the bag?
'A wed wose, how womantic'
Obviously the husband couldn't have entered the bag, so it in fact was the ghost. But this really never was a problem for me to understand, because if he's a ghost, of course he would be able to come out of the bag. I don't see how could human made bag be an obstacle to a spirit. He was able to change form in any way, so it should be very easy for him to get out of the bag.
I of course have watched the subtitled version of the film, but I think it was the same in the original language, when the shepherd was talking... For the other tests he was saying that the man who is her real husband will accomplish this, and it was Kishan who made those tests. But in the end he said, that the person who is her real love will enter the bag. To me these words were the deciding reason why the ghost did what he did.
agree with you completely. The shepherd, way too wise to be a shepherd, knew who really loved Rani. Supposedly, a waterskin is airtight so everyone else would have thought that the ghost couldn't get out.
shareThat is really insightful, sabrina-mathew (and others), and I agree that the ending is in no way repulsive. But personally I don't like to think of the whole thing as merely a journey to make Kishan complete--as if the Ghost only exists to teach him to become a better husband. Maybe that's so on a metaphorical level, but on the literal level of this story I find it kind of depressing. Kishan made a mistake, after all, not the Ghost, so it seems justified to me that the Ghost survives in the end as more than just a good quality of Kishan. After all, in the very end the Ghost speaks to Lachchi from his own point of view, saying "I entered your husband's body"; if one were to look at it as the Ghost becoming part of an improved Kishan, I think it would make more sense for Kishan to say "The Ghost entered my body." I think that the Ghost is more that just the love that Kishan initially lacks; it's true that he is defined largely by his love for Lachchi, but I don't think that's all there is to him. After all, where did the Ghost come from? He may well have been a person at one time, and as such it would be totally natural for him to have his own personality. At the very start there's something very impudent in his decision to take the form of Kishan at all, as both of the puppets remark (They also say, interestingly, that he's already acting "like a human," or something close to that). In his time with Lachchi as Kishan's double I think he definitely seems to have real traits of his own--like when she wakes him up on the balcony and she says he has to get up and he lazily says, “So?". That’s something that a certain type of person might do, and another type would not, but either type could be very much in love with her. He’s mischievous too, and funny and confident; these are things that aren’t necessarily related to his love for her, and they're things that Kishan doesn't have. I know that the Ghost's love survives in the end, and no one argues that; but I also don’t like to think that these other characteristics he has have departed to make way for the husband—-because, after all, it's not just that the Ghost loves Lachchi; Lachchi loves the Ghost too. This story is really about her, so I think it's important to remember not just what she needs in a man, but what she feels for the man (or spirit) herself. She loves the Ghost for everything about him, not just because he loves her. (Except, of course, for the fact that he is a spirit, which he overcomes with his solution at the end.) If she loses these parts of him, or any part of him, this ultimately amounts to a type of compromise that I don’t think she should have to make—a point which I think is very important to the whole movie.
Anyhow, I don't mean to pick a fight; those are just my thoughts!
I wish I had read your reply before making mine, because that is an excellent explanation.
No, father, the moon's reaching for me!
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I'm so happy I'm not the only person who felt that way!! It does leave a bad taste in your mouth. Faerie Tales are all about poetic justice, nothing happens to someone unless they deserve it. The husband wasn't a bad person, just little mousey. Maybe he could've been painted as a bad person, or something.
No, father, the moon's reaching for me!
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