Synopsis: India. A bicycle dealer, Koshav, meets Jaye, a thoughtful young Indian woman. They fell in love and got married. Jia Ye, a female teacher who accepted modern civilization after marriage, found that her husband's house had no toilet. Because of her husband's family, Koshav's father was an arrogant village Brahmin and a devout Hindu.
Thus, the struggle began over whether to build toilets in the family.
The story takes place in India, and the male protagonist's name is Koshav. As for his social status, he can be regarded as an affordable male from his hometown. He owns an 80% new Honda motorcycle (I didn't know until I watched this movie that Honda still makes motorcycles). Benchmarking China's national conditions, it is estimated that Koshav is also equivalent to driving a Haval H6 in a small county, acting as a secondary agent for a certain brand of bicycles.
Koshav has a good brother, who belongs to the No. 2 loyal male of the youthful vitality faction. Helped my brother a lot in the film. As the saying goes, God opens a door for you and closes a window at the same time. For Koshav, the younger brother was the door that opened in his life, and the closed window in Koshav's life was his stubborn and bigoted Brahmin father.
Here is a little popular science: anyone who sees a red or yellow spot on his forehead in India must be a Hindu. If the person is tall, with a large beard, a red turban, and jewelry all over his neck and hands, he must be a Sikh. If this person is naked, looks like a zombie, and is covered in white ashes, then this person may be a Jain - a Jain sect, if this person does not eat pork, hey, he must be a Muslim... ..
Back to the topic, at the beginning of the film, Koshav is in the haystack, saying goodbye to the plump and graceful girl, which is quite a bit like "Red Sorghum". Because he is going to marry a cow.
Yes, you are not mistaken. Koshav married an affectionate heifer. This is the first bizarre plot of the film. After the grand wedding of Koshav and the heifer, whether there is any contact between the man and the cow beyond ethics, the film does not say clearly, but I think, the Indian man and cow wedding is probably about carnal love, otherwise, such a grand wedding What does the ceremony do...
Why did Koshav marry Niu? According to my understanding, combined with the information I consulted, it should be similar to our ancient Chinese patient's marriage Chongxi (refer to the famous article "Qiao Taishou Chaotic Duck Spectrum" in Sanyan Er Pai). Because Hinduism considers cows to be sacred. Able to help Koshav avoid certain disasters and such. If Koshav was unwilling to marry a cow, he would have to find a woman with two thumbs on one hand to be his wife, which seemed to be as difficult as finding a three-legged toad.
Then, on the train, Koshav and his brother met the heroine Jaye. This woman is simply a clear stream of Indian women's circles: her father is very enlightened, his mother is not ignorant enough to believe in any religion, and she can accept men watching naked girls on TV, singing and dancing, her uncle studied in Japan to study agriculture , she herself is a college student and is now a young teacher. More importantly, her family has her own toilet.
In short, they fell in love after a common Bollywood love pattern - that is, Balabara and a song and dance MTV. In the movie, the male protagonist is more cowardly and dare not disobey his father in the slightest. In order to deceive his father's consent, he made a thumb in exchange for his father's consent to their marriage. A little background here: that's why Koshav dared not say a word to his father. Because his father was a village Brahmin, that is, the top aristocrat in the food chain in the caste system. Even though his father had no power, the dual identity of fatherhood and Brahmin elder theocracy also made Koshav obedient to his father.
After the grand wedding, the two had sex, and at 4:30 in the morning, troubles came - the women's federation of the village came to knock on the door, and a girl opened the window and said, "Sister-in-law, let's carry a small copper basin like cattle and sheep being grazing. Go outside the village to excrete...
After a few times, Jaye couldn't stand it. She believed that people should not excrete in the open air like animals, so she asked to build a toilet at home. As a result, he was reprimanded by the father-in-law......
Why do all the women in the village have to go out in the middle of the night to excrete in the open air? This involves the wonderful religion of Hinduism. In other words, Hinduism believes that building a toilet at home will tarnish the purity of the home and make people feel disgusting. Especially Hinduism stipulates that men want to Excretion, you can show those words anytime and anywhere, but women who want to excretion must do so after nightfall and before dawn. Both men and women can't be convenient at home, but it doesn't matter if you pee and shit on the street, because that's the public, the public, the place, the place!
Seeing this, I really hope that those old Red Guards in China who do not obey the rules and spit square dances and disturb people on the bus want to touch porcelain in front of their seats can move to India to retire. While bathing in the turbid Ganges water full of garbage floating corpses, he took a big bowl and took a big gulp: Come on, comrades, we come from all over the world, and if we drank this bowl of Ganges water, we will be Red Guards in the next life... ...
In fact, the issue of toilets in India has been repeatedly brought up in recent years with the tourism boom. In the award-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire", the male protagonist was full of maggots when he was a child, and the filthy toilet was a toilet experience above the standard in big cities in India. What's more, the big city can't find a toilet, and even if it is found, it is full of feces and urine, and it is filthy......
Tragically, Hinduism is still the number one religion in India. Even though there are still many religions in India, (Sikhism, Jainism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Shintoism, Buddhism, etc...), most of the ordinary people at the bottom still live in the shadow of the caste system. In , Brahmins and religious leaders rule their pathetic cheap lives.
As a husband, Koshav was attacked by his ignorant father and cold and violent wife, and he was angry at both ends. During this period, he thought of various ways to solve his wife's excretion problem:
One, use the train toilet. But India is a developing country, and it is common for trains to be delayed by a day...
Two, go to the house of an old woman who has a toilet, and the old woman may be a non-Hindu. But it's hard to stay under the fence for a long time...
3. The village committee asked the village to build public toilets, but only heard that from the Brahmin elders to the untouchable Shoudra, there was ridicule......
Four, stealing a public place and being arrested...
The war over the toilet escalated, and the wife was so disappointed that she left Koshav and went back to her home. Mocked by villagers and irritated by officials' lengthy administrative applications, Koshav sold his beloved motorcycle and built his own toilet. As a result, it was brutally suppressed by the elders (including his father).
It is worth mentioning that there were many intriguing conversations along the way. Whether it is Koshav's father, the villagers, or even the women who have been raped repeatedly without toilets, Jayenad's respected grandmother, no one thinks that toilets should be built. Not only were they reluctant to be troublesome, but they collectively condemned Jaye, believing that her request to build a toilet was the fault of the arrogant, high-educated culture, and she was making a fuss. This is like the fable said by Mr. Lu Xun, a group of slaves were in a dark house, one day, a slave woke up and said, let's open the window, it's too dark, so the slaves were angry... ....
A series of cold water rushed to the face. Finally, both the male and female protagonists woke up. They realized that toilet construction was not a matter of personal preference, nor was it a matter of disagreement between them and the villagers and their father, but the normal people who embraced modern civilization and the old feudal forces. , religious groups and vested interests are engaged in a war without the smoke of gunpowder.
To this end, they did not hesitate to preach in love: they used divorce as a means to fight against the world. (It's another weird Hindu rule that divorce is an unimaginable, shameful thing that is far more sinful than rape)
Finally, in today's extremely developed Internet, the struggle between male and female protagonists has touched the real God, that is, the ruler. God stretched out his hand to deliver an oracle to governments at all levels, so the ending was happy.
Moved by God, with the help of supernatural powers, the ending is beautiful. It is an important cultural bridge in Asian culture. God can be Zhao Guan's family, Li Lianying, the British governor, or a robber who suddenly has a good heart. In short, the ending is perfect, and that's enough.
This is one of the dead ends of Asia's ignorance and backwardness. Of course, this film does not intend to discuss any political or religious issues. Most of the first half of the film is to pave the way for the second half - the toilet war. In fact, the entire film does not have a real climax, just like Documentary generally, objectively, slowly tell the story. It is neither sensational nor evasive of social issues, and the singing and dancing scenes are only qualified. However, it was able to beat the "Mysterious Superstar" released at the same time at the box office, relying on the pure theme - just like the title of the film "Toilet, a Love Story".
Highly recommended!
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