WATER

Rating: 5

It is worth noting that during Deepa Mehta’s first attempt to produce WATER, the third in her elements trilogy, the sets were burned and she herself went up in flames. At least in effigy. What is it, one might rightly wonder, about a fictional story set in the 1930s concerning the cloistering of widows that, you will pardon the expression, inflames passions to such an extent. The people with the pitchforks and torches, metaphorical and not, hadn’t even seen the script, but the light it sheds on the condition of women in India, then and now, is enough to raise hackles, and a mighty amount of righteous indignation, among people who insist on seeing the female of the species as human beings, not as chattel.

The film begins with Chuyia (Sarala) taking a journey for reasons she doesn’t quite understand during which one of her parents asks her if she remembers being married. An odd question, except that Chuyia is eight years old, and the trip she is making is to the Ganges River where there will be a funeral pyre for her now-deceased adult husband. In her time and her place, child marriage is accepted, as is the practice of sending widows away to live in communal houses under conditions that no one likes to think about. As is made clear, the practice is as much an economic consideration as a religious one/ Widows, particularly those without children to support them, are a financial burden in this poor country. There is a Hindu proscription against re-marriage and in this “enlightened” age, widows are no longer burned on their husband’s funeral pyres, though what does become of them can be considered far worse than a swift if barbaric end to it all.

Mehta introduces this world of women through Chuyia’s eyes. Left on the doorstep of the widow’s house on the banks of the Ganges, her head shaved, and her clothes replaced with the white robes of the widow, she is left to her own devices. She wanders the enclosure, proclaiming loudly to anyone who will listen that her family will be coming for her soon, a rebellious attitude that does not endear her to the mistress of the house, Madhumati, a woman with a hefty girth that is an affront to the hollow eyes and cheeks of her charges who subsist, barely, on the little that she doles out to them, and whose interpretation of Hindu scripture is best described as convenient. Chuyia is taken under wing by Shakuntala (Seema Biswas), a pious widow trying to subsume her sense of self to the strictures of her faith, and she is fascinated with the oldest widow, whose one good memory of her long life is the pastry she had at her wedding. It’s with the adolescent Kalyani (Lisa Ray), though, that she makes friends. Beautiful and with hair unshorn, Kalyani enjoys private quarters and more than the starvation rations the others receive. This isn’t charity or even favoritism on the part of Madhmati, but rather a way of insuring a higher price when she pimps the girl out to the local patricians who are willing to overlook the bad luck that comes of associating with even a widow’s shadow.

A chance meeting with a college student full of idealism and progressive ideas (John Abraham) changes Kalyani’s world and offers that most dangerous commodity: hope. He relentlessly courts her, gradually winning her over, to the horror of everyone he knows, particularly his mother. For her part, Kalyani must contend with the other women in the house, who, when they learn of her plans, fear for their safety in this world and the next if Kalyani remarries.

This is a film with little dialogue. Little is necessary. The silence of despair slowly and inexorably gives way to an even more demoralizing resignation. The colors are pale, grays and whites that are punctuated with splashes of bright yellows and crimsons, a rebuke as well as a reminder of the life from which they are forever separated. Mehta lets images too powerful for words illuminate the emotional life of these women. The oldest widow in the house, curled on the floor awaiting death, a study of shadowy gray and spectral white, awakens to finds a pastry like the ones at her wedding beside her. Its vivid yellow overwhelms the her before she can even bring herself to touch it, much less taste it, while that tiny speck of color jumping off the screen brilliantly focuses the eye and the psyche of the audience to the waste of a this life and of the others in that house.

The performances are richly complex, with emotions leaping from the screen with the same vivid urgency as those strictly rationed splashes of color.

It is that last which Mehta examines with an unflinching and unforgiving eye when considering the sin of collusion. This is an unforgettable film of devastating beauty, but one that requires much from its characters and from its audience when judging the rightness of what transpires. That what occurs in the film is still happening today in India, and in uncountable variations around the world, is Mehta’s condemnation and her challenge to the viewer.