Deepa Mehta’s “Water” is a subtly provocative piece of filmmaking which arrives after an arduous six years of attempting to get the film made amid Hindi fundamentalists who saw the subject matter as controversial, irreverent, and damaging.
Mehta attempted to make the film in India in 2000 but was forced to shut down production when sets were destroyed. Mehta also received death threats and had no choice but to push back the project for a couple years to allow the frenzy to die down. Having to recast and moving the production to Sri Lanka, Mehta was finally allowed to make the film she wanted to make.
The film is set in India in 1938 and here we meet our young protagonist Chuyia (Sarala), an eight-year old girl who suddenly finds herself a widow even without remembering the wedding. Her traditional Hindu parents hold fast to Hindu law which supplies limited options to the surviving widow. She may die alongside her husband by throwing herself on the husband’s funeral pyre, she may marry his younger brother if he has one or she could live out the rest of her life in a relative banishment, exiled to an ashram with other widows in a life of poverty and solitude. Chuyia’s husband obviously did not have a younger brother so her parents had no choice (in their minds) but to turn her over to a local ashram (a communal home for widows) which is a slightly better fate than death.
The Hindu teachings say that a wife is one half her husband so when her husband dies, she becomes one half his death, half a corpse if you will and she should live in a manner so prescribed by this – solitude, ostracism, her hair shaved off, wearing a plain white sari, one meal a day. So the widows in the ashram all live by this code, young and old. The ashram is run by the chubby, insolent, and tyrannical Madhumati (a gleefully repugnant Manorama) who takes no small amount of pleasure in tormenting Chuyia.
Chuyia after realizing the permanence of her situation seeks out friendship in Kalyani (Lisa Ray), a beautiful widow who seems to be exiled even within the confines of the ashram because she has long hair. We come to find out she is allowed her long hair by Madhumati who with the help of a eunuch pimps her out to the wealthy men across the Ganges river for extra income.
A misadventure leads Chuyia and Kalyani to meeting a handsome, young student Narayan (John Abraham), who becomes enraptured by the teachings of Ghandi and whose liberal leanings upset his conservative mother. Kalyani and Narayan fall fast in love and plan to marry, upsetting the ashram and Madhumati (who no doubt doesn’t want to lose her cash flow) and Narayan’s mother whose world seems to be shaken by the very idea of her son marrying a widow (what will the neighbors think?!)
“Water” is the third in Mehta’s “elemental” trilogy following 1996’s “Fire” which dealt with lesbianism among Indian women and 1998’s “Earth” detailing the division of Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. Socially and politically relevant, her films also happen to be beautifully told. Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens who collaborated with her on the other films of the trilogy has a real eye for landscapes and appropriately fills “Water” with stunning shades of blue and green, making each shot a postcard vista – a surrealistic, beauty of an India that most likely never existed except in a distant memory. That these visuals are in stark contrast to the sometimes very weighty issues of the film is no doubt a deliberate choice, a way to remove the soapbox in a less obvious way.
The cast is uniformly excellent and even though the message is an important one, the movie is also consistently entertaining with fully realized moments of drama, romance and a surprisingly abundant amount of humor, even crude humor. And the film never delves into heavy-handedness or preaching and only barely touches on melodrama. Granted the romance between Kalyani and Narayan is slightly contrived and less developed than it needed to be to buy full acceptance from the audience but the cast and the rest of the film works so well that it becomes barely noticeable.
The film is presented in 2.35:1 widescreen and is enhanced for widescreen televisions. Special Features include a full-length commentary by Deepa Mehta that is predictably informative and intriguing covering a wide array of topics concerning the film. Also provided is a four-minute featurette “The Making of Water” and the much better 21-minute “A Behind the Scenes Look” which features interviews with Mehta and the cast and explores some of the controversy surrounding the film.
It’s obvious why Deepa Mehta is not liked among Indian conservatives who take issue with an Indian woman making political and social commentaries, yet it still amazes me that even in 2006, a film daring to make the suggestion that 33 million Indian widows be treated with reverence and dignity, could meet such a troubling resistance.
Water is now available at Amazon . As of yet, there is not a release date for the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.
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