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As intelligent as it is ravishing, Deepa Mehta’s Water is a moving portrayal of impossible love and possible hope. Fronted by an equally ravishing combination of Bollywood stars Lisa Ray and John Abraham and cloaked in a historical drama set within Indian’s widow caste, it tells the story of a young widow who falls in love with a man so far beyond her station he might as well be a god. But it would be simplistic to categorise the film as a love story, or for that matter, a tragedy. Full of sentiment but not at all sentimental, it is an uncompromising and complex condemnation of the dehumanisation of women by religion. Indeed, the film contains two shocking revelations that propel the film beyond issues of plot into an elemental exploration of the human need for gods. As the opening night gala for their 30th festival, Toronto organisers could not have asked for a more distinguished film. And Fox Searchlight, which has the film for the US, could not have hoped for a better launch-pad; critical accolades are already flowing in, priming the vital word-of-mouth that will help the film find an audience. That it is an entirely Canadian film in terms of provenance but shot entirely in Hindi may hinder its prospects for a foreign-language nomination, given that Canadian contenders are generally from French Canada. Then again, the film is strong enough and accessible enough to warrant award season attention. The final chapter in the Indo-Canadian filmmaker’s Element trilogy, Water addresses the role and politics of religion in lives of women, just as the previous films Fire (1996) considered sexuality and Earth (1998) considered nationalism. Although the film is set in 1938 during the rise of Mahatma Gandhi, it holds resonance for today. Indeed, the long gap between the second and third films was the result of the violent shutting down of Water’s original 2000 production by Hindu fundamentalists. This new production, entirely recast, was filmed in Sri Lanka under an assumed title in 2004. The film opens with an explanatory text: Under ancient Hindu scripture, when a woman marries a man, she becomes half of him so that when he dies, she is considered half-dead. (This practice persists in present-day India; hence, the fundamentalist outrage, and the presence of a bodyguard at Mehta’s side during the festival). The story begins with funeral posing as a marriage: Chuyia, (Sarala) an eight-year-old girl, is being married to a dying man. By nightfall he is dead, his corpse burned on the bank of a holy river, and Chuyia is being prepared for her destiny. Shorn of her hair, she is placed in an ashram of fellow widows, there to spend the rest of her days as a kind of human shrine to the dead man. But the ashram is a travesty, ruled over by a massive gargoyle named Mahhumati (Manorma) who controls the lives of her fellow inmates like the mother superior of some hellish convent. Smoking ganja supplied by the local pimp, she farms out the younger widows as prostitutes - until they have lost their allure as money-makers. The ashram’s main source of income is Kalyani (Ray), whose long hair advertises her role as the current golden goose. She has sublimated her personality so entirely that she can rationalise the disconnection between spiritual purity and corporeal infamy: “to live as the beautiful lotus flower untouched by the dirty water in which it resides”. Smitten with the sprightly Chuyia, Kalyani takes her on an outing to the river to wash her puppy of its fleas. True to the title, water is everywhere in the film, not just as metaphor but, as in this case, a plot device. At the river, Kalyani encounters Narayan (Abraham), a young Gandhian idealist, and the son of Brahmins, the highest order in the Indian caste system. Studying law, thrilled by the social revolution presented by the Mahatma’s politics, he is eager to reject centuries-old cultural boundaries, especially that between him and the young widow. With Chuyia as the classic go-between, their impossible relationship gradually blossoms. But Mehta’s purpose is not to follow the obvious path of romance but to explore the effect of the relationship on the other people in the story; to look into faces that are for the first time seeing their world in a new and much harsher light. Secondary characters, particularly the widows of the ashram, are allowed to breath and develop, and hence carry pivotal importance. Shakuntala (Biswas, star of Bandit Queen), a serious and deeply religious woman, begins to see through the eyes of her child peer and, like her, to question what are seemingly obvious truths and foregone conclusions, and to question her own faith. |
