That Mehta would not have an eye for detail should be expected by now. We see women dressed in garish polyester saris in the 1930s along with taxi cabs. The crowds are uniformly accoutered in spotless white complete with Gandhi topis. There is no space and time transportation - realism at any level is clearly not a priority. This is the cinematic equivalent of serving a half cooked food to dinner guests - unpardonable carelessness.
She is also historically inaccurate in her depiction of Gandhi, but westerners would not recognize Raja Ram Mohan Roy quite as easily, so I guess it is okay to swap their places in history. The fact that the story suffers from factual inaccuracies is not such a big deal. One is willing to view it as a work of fiction, perhaps a director's spin on a certain zeitgeist or even rewritten history for art's sake. All of that is perfectly acceptable if indeed it results in a work of art and not in such an immature abomination of it.So when Time calls this movie "a triumph" and Ebert and Roeper give it two thumbs up, one wonders if they are being condescending or merely facetious. Surely, they cannot be serious. The only other possibility is that the leading lights of Indian parallel cinema did not go nearly as far as Mehta to pimp their work, country, and culture to the west and as such never saw their movies make it to an influential western reviewer’s inbox. The loss is as much theirs as it is ours.
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...