Most of the movie is played out in a slow and measured progression of events. Information about the traditional Hindu customs, traditions, and practices are doled out in small bites to the audience. Character development is slow and studied as well. Mehta simply shows some of the religious activities without trying to explain them to the audience. There is no voice-over narration or explanatory dialog to help along an American audience, but it is never a barrier to understanding the dramatic story.
Dialog is in Hindi and the DVD offers subtitles in English and Spanish. Strangely, several of the actors did not speak Hindi. The astonishing performance of the young girl, Sarala, who plays Chuyia is more amazing when you learn she was cast in Sri Lanka and learned the entire script as phonetic memorization! Lisa Ray, the fashion model turned actress who plays Kalyani, had to work on diction and facility with the Hindi dialog since she is another Toronto resident who only speaks Hindi as a second language after English. Both women turn in excellent performances.
The movie is shot as a visual art piece. Colors are filtered to subtly showcase watery blues and greens. Dark interior shots are always easily made out, with soft unobtrusive lighting on the actors' faces so you know exactly who is inside and can see what they are doing. The focus on the widows in the ashram means there is a preponderance of soft washed out colors, since they all wear white saris and live in stone and earth settings. When Mehta contrasts this with a scene showing the Festival of Color (the one day a year when the widows can indulge their visual senses), she super saturates the bright yellows and reds so they practically jump off the screen.
Although the movie is definitely not a "Bollywood musical," Mehta does insert one standard Indian movie sequence featuring a song and shots of the young lovers expressing their happiness in a music video style. It feels jarring and out of place with the rest of the movie to me, but I am not an Indian film fanatic used to seeing musical numbers in every film I see.
Article comments
1 - Mayank Austen Soofi
Nice review. This film, as was expected, has a history of controversy behind it here in India. ‘Water’ was originally planned to be made in the holy city of Benares, on the ghats of the river Ganges, where there are several old mansions that houses the real widows (Benares widow houses had also found a evocative description in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’). But Hindu conservative parties accused the director Deepa Mehta of causing religious offense and complained of portraying the religion in bad light. The demonstrations had turned violent forcing Ms Mehta to wrap up her team. She called it an off.
She later went on to make ‘Earth’ (about Indian partition; the film was based on Pakistani author Bapsi Sidhwa’s classic novel ‘Cracking India) in Delhi. ‘Water’ was made, as the reviewer mentioned, in Sri Lanka - away from the spotlight of those who believe (mistakenly) that by raising questions about the bad practices of a religion is akin to spoiling its reputation.
2 - Apollo
The dumbness of westerners whenever u speak of India or Hinduism never ceases to amuse me :). I simply don't understand why u need to take a marxist with a "Hindu" name so seriously?
Do u know what the likes of mehta will say about u Americans behind ur backs? They call u capitalist pigs and ur women as whores.
And turning towards u they call Indians as "Hindu extremists".
I'am not going to waste my time pointing to the factual inaccuracies in ur article except one to show where u stand.
"Chuyia one day is outside the ashram on the main city streets and runs into Narayan, a man also in his mid-20's and a progressive follower of Gandhi (who is just becoming publicly prominent and starting to promote nationalism to take the country out of British rule)."
If the movie is set in 1938. then Gandhi has been "prominent" in India for nearly 22 years already.
sorry for being harsh. but just for a moment think Why did u Americans own Slaves a 100 years ago?
DO u think it was a social evil or ur "religious scriptures" demanded that a good American should own slaves and whip them regularly?