Indian-born director Deepa Mehta makes powerful,
controversial films that challenge the mores of her society and its dominant
religion; her daring has gotten her banned, threatened, and burned in effigy.
So why doesn't it allow her to escape rote romance tropes? She broke boundaries
with 1996's Fire, the first of her
loosely associated "elements trilogy": the central lesbian relationship
attacked arranged marriages and modern Hindu attitudes toward women. But its
1998 follow-up Earth offered
diminishing returns with another account of forbidden love, this time between a
Hindu and a Muslim in 1947, when interfaith conflict was at a historical
height. Mehta's latest, Water,
completes the trilogy with a doubly prohibited romance between a widow and a
lower-caste man. But the seams in the formula are showing, and the stakes have
never felt lower.
Water
opens with an aphorism explaining that a woman who is unfaithful to her husband
is "reborn in the womb of a jackal"; it quickly becomes apparent that this ban
against "infidelity" extends even after the husband's death. In 1938 India, an
8-year-old girl (Sarala) in an arranged marriage
first learns of this when her husband dies, and she's taken to a widows'
ashram, where she's expected to live out the rest of her life in poverty,
chastity, and humble obscurity. For a while, she plays the standard role of
bright young children in touching dramas: She opens up everyone's world and
touches their hearts, charming the recalcitrant widows and brashly deflating
their de facto ruler, an abrasive sybarite who pimps out the ashram's most
beautiful resident (Bollywood/Hollywood's Lisa Ray) to support the widows–and her own tastes for
drugs and good food. Ray accepts her thankless role mildly, until she meets
idealistic Gandhi acolyte John Abraham, a forward-thinker who resists the Hindu
ban against widows remarrying.
According to tradition,
their romance is unthinkable. Still, it proceeds so smoothly and blandly that
it never becomes personal or engaging. And it's a shame when the film's more
complicated and better-realized characters–particularly Sarala and Seema Biswas, a gruff older widow struggling with her faith–get
shunted aside for the sake of their generic, vaguely realized love. Water is gorgeously composed and beautifully shot, with a dogged
emphasis on water imagery and symbolism, and a luscious sense for color. It's
often profoundly beautiful. But its distanced, calculated attempts to draw
sympathy, from its wide-eyed child protagonist to its sad-eyed,
personality-free lovers to its fairy-tale ending, all blunt the meaning behind
that beauty. Elemental theme aside, it could really use a dose of Fire's heat.