Movie Review: Water, An Essential Film

By Pegah Aarabi

Amidst political and social controversy, Deepa Mehta's final installment of the "elements" trilogy, Water, is a gripping look into the plight and strength of women. The themes in the story are not unlike many films, there's love, loss, politics and turmoil, but this film is distinctive because it takes you into a world that few know about but by the end you feel as if you've been a part of it all.

Water is set in the late 1930's during a time of immense transition in India, when Mahatma Gandhi led the independence struggle against British colonial rule. This political theme is the backdrop for the struggle of the widows in an ashram, a home for widows in a Hindu temple, who are sent there to live a life of grief and solitude in accordance with ancient Hindu religious doctrines.

Water is Mehta's follow-up to the first two element films, Fire and Earth. Fire follows the story of two wives who turn to each other for a relationship to escape their husbands' indifference towards them. Earth, based on Bapsi Sidhwa's book Cracking India, is set in Lahore, India during the tumultuous time in 1947 after the end of British colonial rule. The film follows a circle of diverse friends and particularly a young Parsee girl named Lenny whose nanny, Shanta, a Hindu, falls in love with Hassan, a Muslim. The story unravels as the violence and hate grow in the region.

Similar to the preceding Mehta films, Water delves into the most controversial issues, including patriarchy, religion, corruption, poverty, child prostitution, and forbidden love. These issues are brought to light through the stories of three widows: Chuyia (Sarala), a child widow who breathes life into the ashram; Kalyani (Lisa Ray) a beautiful young widow who falls in love with a reformist law student, Narayana (John Abraham); and Shakuntala (Seema Biswas), a devout believer in the traditions who struggles to make sense of the realities that surround her.

Part of the film's success is the use of subtle elements to get its controversial themes across. It's this subtlety that captivates the audience within a deep and troubling storyline. Unlike many mainstream films where the messages are blatantly expressed, in Water, Mehta expresses the themes using common elements. The most obvious element is water itself. Water plays a key role in the film as it marks a beginning and ending and shows the conflict between purity and impurity, for example the ashram is by water, where the widows bathe to cleanse but it's also where they are burned when they die. Water plays a role in the love story between Kalyani and Narayana, marking their beginning - they encounter each other up close when Kalyani spills water on Narayana – and their ending. The child widow, Chuyia, in a sense, is like water herself because she is the life-source of the ashram and refreshes the widows' spirits.

Water is a successful combination of a daring plotline – as it takes on some very difficult topics head-on, strong acting on the part of the key characters, and the subtle underlying elements that keep the film from becoming overbearing.

The story behind the film is just as enticing as the film itself. In 2000 Mehta was set to begin filming Water in Varanasi, India. But based on her previous controversial films and the plotline of this one, sets were burned and filming was met with thousands of protesters. While she had permission to shoot the film, because of the unrest, the Indian government declared that law and order was at risk and that filming must be stopped. In 2004 Mehta began filming again, this time in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

See our interview with Deepa Mehta