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.
Article comments
1 - sudipto
Very well written article/ review. Though I am not too sure if I would spend so much time and energy on this film. There is a word I had always heard about but its full meaning dawned on me after watching Water - the word is Kitsch. Actually I didn't watch the complete film.
If I could please add to your exhaustive list - the picture of Gandhi that Narayan puts up in his room. I don't think Gandhi looked that old in 1938 !!
But then you know, this film is made for the foreign audience, who has perhaps seen the Taj or been to Dharamsala or the Osho Ashram in Pune or has taken a backwater cruise in Kerala or the camel ride in Rajasthan. They wouldn't know that the banks of Ganga in Varanasi wouldn't have coconut trees. Or that Gandhi didn't look that old in 1938 (if at all he was adulated with photograph on the walls of his followers in small town India). I am not even getting into the other complicated areas.
This film is not for you and me - dirty Indians, who send our child widows to Ashrams. We know these uncomfortable facts that would easily rank Deepa Mehta as part of Kitsch who hires eye candies like John Abraham and Lisa Ray to act in period films. And we are not part of the huge PR industry either that would call this film "sensitive".
I have one small question - did Salman Rushdie really say what he is quoted to have said in the Deepa Mehta website for Water? If yes, where? I am really curious.
I have another observation to make about these "Indian" films with an eye on the foreign market. Even top of the line film makers like Meera Nair are falling prey to this casual attitude to detail. Meera Nair's period film Namesake starts with a steel trunk on a coolie's head with a glowsign of IndusInd Bank behind. Do you think the Hinduja's financed that film? I don't know, but the backpackers aren't bothered really. We silly Indians are ......
2 - Anand
I'm sure that the author watched the film.
Hopefully placing this film next to Slumdog Millionaire allows for one to see the difference between sensationalist fiction and tragic reality.
Oh and read some Sam Harris while you're at it.
3 - HC
Anand - You are exactly right about Slumdog. I wrote a post about that movie after watching it...