A Simple but Lovable Film
By Monica Mody

If Amol Palekar’s Paheli is your first acquaintance with the tale of a woman who fell in love with a ghost, you might be kinder towards it than me. I profit from having read Vijaydan Detha’s short story, on which it is based, in the book “The Dilemma and other stories” (translator Ruth Vanita, editor Madhu Kishwar) and perhaps judge it on standards other than those it aspires to.

“The Dilemma”, the story that has been made into the film, is the only one in Detha’s collection to depict a marriage where a man and a woman are happy, and the man here is a ghost. Like the other stories, it walks a narrow path between reality and phantasma where women – spirited women, desiring women – take precarious steps to grab at life or revenge.

	Paheli Website

Paheli lacks this edge, this sense of menace. I got a hint of it in the dazzling Rajasthani baoli (stepwell) where Rani Mukherjee first glimpses the ghost, and right at the end, with Shahrukh Khan convincingly playing the dazed, righteous, frightened son as well as the pokerfaced ghost and Amitabh Bachchan appearing in his customary role of an eccentric wise ol’ guy.

At other places, the film could have been tauter, leaner. Songs are colorfully shot – in fact the cinematography by Ravi K. Chandran is what gives the film that luster – but there are too many of them and by the time we were into the fourth one, had lost their charm. The music is by M.M. Kreem and in Dheere Jalna, he almost touches the Tu Mile magic. The rest of the songs are good for a listen but didn’t induce me to ecstasy.

Watch out for Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah: as the voices of the ghost’s well-wishers (and family elders?) they are a real delight. They call each other “maharaj” and “maharani” and I wish we had seen more of them. At least more than the other subplots: a brother-in-law who leaves the house in shame after losing a camel race; a sister-in-law who advises Rani to be patient, patient till her husband gets back; the camel race ghost-directed by SRK (aaargh! This has to be the worst directed race ever. What was the point?) and the totally unconvincing foes of the merchant. There is a reason why Mani Kaul’s Duvidha, made on the same story in 1973, was so spare (I haven’t seen it but take a film buff friend’s word for it). Folktales work because they’re allusive; they leave so much to the imagination. The more you try to explain, depict, the less there is of a slippery yarn, the more there is of rocky reality.

SRK, who is also the producer of the film, flew in experts for the special effects, and to their credit the special effects (except for the blue bird at the beginning of the film) look completely unforced.

Whether as the ghost or as the merchant’s newly-wed geeky son who is miles apart from his wife and angsts, gazing at the moon, then takes back the ber she had coveted during their journey after the wedding, Shahrukh is brilliant. Rani fields her role competently, and Anupam Kher is simply terrific as the avaricious father.

Amol Palekar, after Anahat, continues his quest to direct films with understated feminist messages: this film celebrates the woman’s right to choose (although I thought Rani’s voice got somewhat muffled among the numerous other voices in the film).

The Rajasthan Palekar creates is vibrant and lush. With a tighter control over the script and fistfuls of otherworldliness, Paheli could have become a blistering tale instead of “a simple, lovable film.”