Perhaps the only positive thing I can say about Deepa Mehta's Water is that it provoked me to list in painful detail all of the reasons I did not like it. That is possibly a better reaction to a movie than to have walked away to get dinner started and not been able to recall the name an hour later.

Since the negatives are abundant, I will start with the few saving graces. The film opens with a scene of an adorable girl wearing a nose ring and anklets, chewing on a stick of sugar cane. She has not even had the time to register that she is married when her father tells her she is now a widow. She asks him "For how long?" That was a beautiful and promising opening, except for the disproportionately strong sitar background music.

Mehta, as is evident throughout the movie, does believe that less is more, at least in editing. Chuyia, the child widow turning hysterical as she refuses to accept the status-quo of widowhood, is portrayed very well. The only other plus that comes to mind is Raghubir Yadav in drag, though its amazing how little Mehta could make of his prodigious acting abilities.

Why is the Hindi so stilted, one wonders the minute the characters start to talk? It does not belong to any part of India. Is this a bilingual movie? Once you get past that annoyance, it dawns on you that the cast is about as professional as a group of middle schoolers in their first theatrical production. They shuffle around like a bunch of unsynchronized puppets completely devoid of facial expression.

Our generation came of age along with the second wave of parallel cinema in India. A thinking person's cinema was made by the likes of Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalini, Sai Paranjpye and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. We have seen poverty, corruption, casteism and a plethora of other ills that ail Indian society depicted with gut-wrenching realism — Paar, Arth Satya, Aakrosh, Mirch Masala come to mind immediately, but there are so many others.

Anyone who has watched the pregnant Shabana Azmi and Naseruddin Shah herd their cattle through a river in spate in Paar has been forced to confront truths about India that they may have been in denial of. That is perhaps the role of a movie that purports to bear a social message.

Watching the expressionless John Abraham woo an equally bland Lisa Ray with verses from Meghdutam is a slap in the face of the destitute widows of the early 1900s, who were often forced into prostitution just to have enough to eat. With her unflappable serenity, au naturel makeup and gym toned body Lisa Ray makes widowhood of the 1930s look quite desirable. Mehta does not manage to provoke any visceral reaction from her audience. The music is too loud, often too modern, and almost entirely out of synch with the situation at hand. For her, there are lessons to be learnt about an effective background score even from The Tiger and The Brahmin.