WATER
(PG-13) The third and most daring installment of writer-director Deepa Mehta’s “Elements” trilogy is a grand and gloomy romance about the restrictive, impoverished lives of Hindu widows in 1930s India. 1:54 (violence, harsh imagery, sexual content). In Hindi with English subtitles. At select theaters.
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‘Water’
‘Water’ (Newsday / Bruce Gilbert)
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A controversial director gets in hot ‘Water’
Apr 26, 2006
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BY GENE SEYMOUR.STAFF WRITER
April 28, 2006
Though “Water” is both its title and its recurring motif, Deepa Mehta’s controversial new epic is driven by a scorching urgency whose intensity exceeds even the previous two installments of Mehta’s “Elements” trilogy of Indian romances.
Both “Fire” (1996) and “Earth” (1998) challenged religious orthodoxy, sexual taboos and class restrictions with lush detail buttressed by headlong passion. But the violent opposition accompanying “Water’s” filming - from fundamentalist protests to on-set arson to death threats against writer-director Mehta - has only intensified the fiery glow this film now carries to American audiences, for whom the abuses chronicled may be a startling revelation.
Set in 1938, almost a decade before India achieved its independence as a nation, “Water” focuses on the practice of forcing widowed Hindu women to live apart from society in ashrams where their hair is shorn, their clothes forsaken for white robes and their freedom taken away in penitence for their bad karma.
It apparently doesn’t matter if the widow is only 8 years old like Chuyia (Sarala) and never even knew she had a husband, dead or alive. She is taken to a house of widows under the corrupt, abusive dominion of Madhumati (Manorama).
The free-spirited Chuyia has no intention of following Madhumati’s rules and her defiance affects such residents as the kindly Shakuntala (Seema Biswas) and the stunning Kalyani (Lisa Ray), who gradually embarks on a forbidden romance with Narayan (John Abraham), a law student and partisan of the then-ascendant Mohandas Gandhi. Narayan’s carefully groomed stubble, more 1990s than 1930s, is but one hint of Mehta’s indulgence in romantic gloss. But such aspects, as with “Water’s” characters, are overpowered by history’s momentum. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/14440729.htm
One of this century’s human tragedies, as witnessed by a child
By Richard Phillips
21 July 1999
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Earth, by Deepa Mehta is an intelligent and deeply moving personal account of the partition of India.
In August 1947 the departing British colonial rulers announced the division of India into a Muslim-controlled Pakistan and a Hindu-Sikh dominated India. The partition was organised by the British Labour government with the support and collaboration of the Muslim League and the Indian Congress Party.
At least 11 million people—Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others—caught on the wrong side of the dividing lines were driven out of their homes. Some reports put the death toll from communalist pogroms and rioting at one million. The greatest numbers were killed in Punjab, which was split in two. Tens of thousands died in weeks of carnage.
Many commentators have described this event as one of the worst man-made tragedies of the last half-century. It was a political catastrophe whose reverberations are still being felt, and one that has plunged the sub-continent into three wars and in recent months brought India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. (As a point of information, the first proposal drawn up by the British in 1947 was called “Plan Balkan” and envisaged the fragmentation of India. It was abandoned and partition adopted after concerns were raised about the dangers posed by the disintegration of the Indian military.)
Deepa Mehta’s film, which bases itself on Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India, portrays this disaster through the eyes of a child—Lenny, an 8-year-old crippled girl—from Lahore, the Punjabi city that saw some of the bloodiest pogroms. The experiences, hopes and fears of this young girl provide an intense portrait of the period.
Young Lenny (Maia Sethna) belongs to the Parsee minority, a religious sect that immigrated to India from Persia during the 9th century in order to escape religious persecution following the rise of Islam. The Parsees, because of their willingness to cooperate with the British colonial rulers, carved out a comfortable existence as merchants and industrialists.
Lenny’s family is well off and maintains friendly relations with the British authorities and the various religious groupings. The family household has six servants drawn from a number of different religious backgrounds. Lenny has a warm and loving family and a life free of care. Her nanny, Ayah Shanta (Nandita Das), a beautiful young Hindu woman has several young men—Sikh, Hindu and Muslim—wooing her and who also treat Lenny with equal affection. The harmony in Lenny’s life, however, begins to break up as the date approaches for the British to quit India and they prepare to divide the sub-continent.
A dinner party held at the house, attended by the British Inspectorate of Police and Mr Singh, a Sikh friend of the family, erupts over the future of the country. Lenny and her precocious young cousin, hiding under the dinner table, hear Singh denounce the British.
Relations between Lenny’s parents and various business associates start to turn sour. Everyday jokes and innocent games between friends of different religious backgrounds are replaced by bickering and harsh remarks over religion and family bloodlines. Leaders of the religious and ethnic groupings begin jockeying for positions within the new order being established by the departing British authorities.
Even as the mood becomes charged with rumours and dangerous tensions, Ayah’s love-life blossoms and her affections turn towards Hasan (Rahul Khanna), a Muslim. Hasan urges Ayah’s friends to stand by each other and resist the increasing fanaticism.
But rising tensions are inflamed with reports of murder, rape, and rioting mobs wrecking homes, shops and temples and mosques. Ice Candy Man (Aamir Khan), another young man vying for Ayah’s affection, is inexorably drawn in by communalist rhetoric; each rumour and massacre report unhinging the previously stable and affable young man.
When Ayah falls in love with Hasan, Ice Candy Man, enraged by jealousy and wound-up by the mob atmosphere, leads a group of Muslim rioters to Lenny’s house to demand the removal of all Hindu servants, including Ayah. The servants attempt to protect Ayah, claiming that she has left the house. Lenny, disoriented by the menacing mob and trusting the Ice Candy Man, admits that Ayah is still in the house. The young nanny is dragged off to her death. Lenny’s innocent mistake will haunt her for the rest of her life.
One British film critic has described Earth as a “mawkish look at the impact of partition on a small group of friends of mixed religions … a Bollywood influenced confection … that attempts to shock with a catalogue of atrocities”.
These condescending remarks are without foundation and leave one wondering what sort of film would satisfy this critic. Perhaps a cold impersonal account, in which real people are translated into silent, abstract numbers, figures to be examined like microbes in a laboratory test-tube?
In opposition to the climate of cynicism and callous indifference to the fate of ordinary people, Earth is a courageous and humane film. Mehta is clearly animated by a determination to end the long silence by western filmmakers and artists about this terrible chapter in the 20th century.
The film is rich with comments from its characters denouncing partition and double-talking local politicians. One particularly notable moment sees the film’s protagonists listening to a radio broadcast by Congress Party leader Jawaharial Nehru, India’s first prime minister.
Nehru declares: “At the stroke of the midnight hour [August 15, 1947], when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” These comments are greeted with cynicism and disgust, with one of the characters later declaring that “independence from the British will be soaked in our brothers’ blood”.
Excellent performances by its cast, in particular Maia Sethna as Lenny and the alluring Nandita Das as Ayah; and an hypnotic musical score by A. R. Rahman, with lyrics by Javed Akhtar, one of India’s leading poets, combine to make Earth a powerful work.
In a world where nationalism prevails in popular culture, Mehta’s film is a breath of fresh air, a salutary warning of the consequences of chauvinism and religious bigotry and a testimony to this director’s principled approach to filmmaking.
The film is lovely in the way Satyajit Ray’s films are lovely. It sees poverty and deprivation as a condition of life, not an exception to it, and finds beauty in the souls of its characters. Their misfortune does not make them unattractive. In many Indian films it is not startling to be poor, or to be in the thrall of 2,000-year-old customs; such matters are taken for granted, and the story goes on from there. I am reminded of Ray’s “The Big City” (1963) in which the husband loses his work and this wife breaks with all tradition and good practice by leaving their home to take employment. The husband is deeply disturbed, but his wife finds that, after all, being a woman and having a job is no big deal.
the story was great.. but the movie was quite pathetically made.. atleast i found it so… it was very very very slow paced and it just never reached any sort of climax, failed to keep me interested (altho i did watch the whole flick cuz i dont like leaving movies unfinished)…
not at all fun to watch. She could have done a whole lot more with the subject of widowed women and widow houses…
Is this the same WATER in which Shabana Azmi was playing a role of widow and it's shooting got ban few years back?
Shabana Azmi shoved her head for this film.
Nope, I’m talking about Water, not Earth. The book is called, Water by Bapsi Sidhwa. I read the book, and after reading it, I wouldn’t want to spoil it by watching the movie.
This is pasted from Amazon.com about the book:
Set in 1938, against the backdrop of Gandhi’s rise to power, Water follows the life of eight-year-old Chuyia, abandoned at a widow’s ashram after the death of her elderly husband. There, she must live in penitence until her death. Unwilling to accept her fate, she becomes a catalyst for change in the widows’s lives. When her friend Kalyani, a beautiful widow-prostitute, falls in love with a young, upper-class Gandhian idealist, the forbidden affair boldly defies Hindu tradition and threatens to undermine the ashram’s delicate balance of power. This riveting look at the lives of widows in colonial India is ultimately a haunting and lyrical story of love, faith, and redemption.
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