It’s October, and here at the Gorilla’s Lament that can mean only
one thing: our second annual Bhooty Call, a month long celebration of
the ghosts of Bollywood. First up is Ek Aatma: The Ghost in Love (2004). Ek Aatma
is one of the strange hybrid films that Bollywood sometimes produces;
it takes one devotional movie about a virtuous woman who suffers many
hardships but persists through her unshakable faith in the Goddess, and
one thriller about a ghost trying to reunite with her husband, and then
it locks them in a room together and makes them fight.
(Ek Aatma is also obscure enough that the Internet Movie Database has never heard of it, and I’m having a difficult time tracking down any information about it online. I’ll have to edit in actors names and the like when I can.)
The portly but heroic Kumar is a reporter. While on assignment in a rural village, he meets the ill fated Lakshmi, and learns of her tragic past. As a child, she joined her parents on a visit to the village during a festival honoring the Goddess. During the visit, her mother drowns while bathing in the river. Because of the inauspicious timing, and because this is the Village of People Who Jump to Conclusions, the people decide that she wouldn’t have drowned if she hadn’t been an unfaithful wife. Lakshmi’s father decides that if a crowd of strangers believes it, it must be true, so he abandons both the body of his dead wife and his daughter, and leaves town never to be seen again.
Lakshmi is raised by the wife of the village chief, and grows up to be beautiful, devout, and pathologically humble; when Kumar (that silver tongued devil) says that looking at her, he doesn’t believe her mother was an unchaste woman, Lakshmi is so grateful that she bursts into tears and runs off to tell her dead mother that it’s the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to her, and clearly is the answer to all her prayers.
Since the drowning, fifteen years ago, the village hasn’t had any rain at all. Consensus in the village is that that proves the Goddess is still really, really angry at Lakshmi’s mother, so they decide to see if a bit of human sacrifice will improve Her mood. Kumar runs to help her, despite the villagers accusing him of “going against religion”, and in the end the truth has been revealed and Kumar and Lakshmi are married, with Kumar using the mangalsutra from the Goddess’s statue to solemnize the union.
Kumar takes his bride home, but on the wedding night he discovers someone else waiting in the bedroom. She says her name is Kavita, and that she is his wife. Kavita tells Kumar to ask his father, then leaves.
His father tells him that it’s true, he did marry Kavita shortly before developing amnesia. Over the course of a single day, she got him fired from two different jobs, accidentally had him arrested and beaten by her psychotic, overprotective policeman dad, and ignited a blood feud between their respective fathers. By evening, she was madly in love with him. (Granted, this is not a really unusual sequence of events in Bollywood, but the transition from total stranger to one true love is generally not quite so abrupt.)
Kumar’s father accepts their love and helps the young couple to get married. Kavita’s father is less understanding; he shows up after the wedding and takes Kavita away by force, leaving Kumar comatose in the process. (Hence the amnesia.)
Kumar carefully considers his dilemma, and decides that the best solution is to resign himself to having two incredibly gorgeous wives. He’s just about to tell Lakshmi the good news when he runs into Kavita’s mother, and learns that Kavita is in fact dead; she killed herself rather than remove the mangalsutra that Kumar placed around her neck.
Meanwhile, after some rather confusing business with a television set, Lakshmi is attacked by her evil cousin, and is knocked unconscious just before Kavita saves her (by firing lightning from her eyes.) Kavita tries to enter Lakshmi’s body so that she can live out her life with Kumar, but the mangalsutra (taken from the Goddess’s statue, remember?) protects her. So Kavita spends the rest of the film plotting to get Lakshmi to remove it.
While not strictly a devotional; film, Ek Aatma has more in common with Devi Maa than with Bhoot. Virtue is triumphant, and in the end the problem is solved by a literal Deus Ex Machina (only without the Machina. Or the Ex.) The style is very similar as well. The film is filled with gloriously bad cgi; Kavita spends much of her time in ectoplasmic form, doing her best T-1000 impression. It’s really not a conventionally good movie, but it is relentlessly entertaining.
(Ek Aatma is also obscure enough that the Internet Movie Database has never heard of it, and I’m having a difficult time tracking down any information about it online. I’ll have to edit in actors names and the like when I can.)
The portly but heroic Kumar is a reporter. While on assignment in a rural village, he meets the ill fated Lakshmi, and learns of her tragic past. As a child, she joined her parents on a visit to the village during a festival honoring the Goddess. During the visit, her mother drowns while bathing in the river. Because of the inauspicious timing, and because this is the Village of People Who Jump to Conclusions, the people decide that she wouldn’t have drowned if she hadn’t been an unfaithful wife. Lakshmi’s father decides that if a crowd of strangers believes it, it must be true, so he abandons both the body of his dead wife and his daughter, and leaves town never to be seen again.
Lakshmi is raised by the wife of the village chief, and grows up to be beautiful, devout, and pathologically humble; when Kumar (that silver tongued devil) says that looking at her, he doesn’t believe her mother was an unchaste woman, Lakshmi is so grateful that she bursts into tears and runs off to tell her dead mother that it’s the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to her, and clearly is the answer to all her prayers.
Since the drowning, fifteen years ago, the village hasn’t had any rain at all. Consensus in the village is that that proves the Goddess is still really, really angry at Lakshmi’s mother, so they decide to see if a bit of human sacrifice will improve Her mood. Kumar runs to help her, despite the villagers accusing him of “going against religion”, and in the end the truth has been revealed and Kumar and Lakshmi are married, with Kumar using the mangalsutra from the Goddess’s statue to solemnize the union.
Kumar takes his bride home, but on the wedding night he discovers someone else waiting in the bedroom. She says her name is Kavita, and that she is his wife. Kavita tells Kumar to ask his father, then leaves.
His father tells him that it’s true, he did marry Kavita shortly before developing amnesia. Over the course of a single day, she got him fired from two different jobs, accidentally had him arrested and beaten by her psychotic, overprotective policeman dad, and ignited a blood feud between their respective fathers. By evening, she was madly in love with him. (Granted, this is not a really unusual sequence of events in Bollywood, but the transition from total stranger to one true love is generally not quite so abrupt.)
Kumar’s father accepts their love and helps the young couple to get married. Kavita’s father is less understanding; he shows up after the wedding and takes Kavita away by force, leaving Kumar comatose in the process. (Hence the amnesia.)
Kumar carefully considers his dilemma, and decides that the best solution is to resign himself to having two incredibly gorgeous wives. He’s just about to tell Lakshmi the good news when he runs into Kavita’s mother, and learns that Kavita is in fact dead; she killed herself rather than remove the mangalsutra that Kumar placed around her neck.
Meanwhile, after some rather confusing business with a television set, Lakshmi is attacked by her evil cousin, and is knocked unconscious just before Kavita saves her (by firing lightning from her eyes.) Kavita tries to enter Lakshmi’s body so that she can live out her life with Kumar, but the mangalsutra (taken from the Goddess’s statue, remember?) protects her. So Kavita spends the rest of the film plotting to get Lakshmi to remove it.
While not strictly a devotional; film, Ek Aatma has more in common with Devi Maa than with Bhoot. Virtue is triumphant, and in the end the problem is solved by a literal Deus Ex Machina (only without the Machina. Or the Ex.) The style is very similar as well. The film is filled with gloriously bad cgi; Kavita spends much of her time in ectoplasmic form, doing her best T-1000 impression. It’s really not a conventionally good movie, but it is relentlessly entertaining.
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