>>PREVIEW
WATER
STARRING Lisa Ray, John Abraham and Sarala
DIRECTED BY Deepa Mehta
Opens Friday, November 11
Globe Cinema
It’s a curious alchemy of filmmaking that the most troubled productions often result in disproportionately successful finished products – recall the waterlogged chaos of the shoots for Jaws or Titanic, or the arduous life-and-limb ordeals that yielded Werner Herzog’s brilliant Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. In many cases, problems arise because the filmmakers find themselves at the mercy of their environments, but ironically, the elements played no part whatsoever in hampering Water, the concluding chapter of Deepa Mehta’s "elemental trilogy," which also includes Fire (1996) and Earth (1998).
Instead, the Indian-born, Toronto-based filmmaker found herself subject to torment of a human variety when she went on location in Varasani, India in February of 2000. The production was disrupted from the start by protests by Hindu fundamentalists who objected to the script’s handling of its subject – the long-standing religious practice of incarcerating newly widowed women in convents known as ashrams. The crew arrived to find several of their sets burned, and various political groups began to exert pressure on the local government to shut the shoot down. Mehta was burned in effigy and even received death threats, which, coupled with the revocation of several crucial filming permits, resulted in the production’s abrupt termination.
It’s a sobering story, but it has a triumphant conclusion – Mehta never even considered giving up on Water, and after flirting with the mainstream with Bollywood/Hollywood (2002) and The Republic of Love (2003), redirected her energies towards its realization. The production was moved to Sri Lanka, the main roles were recast and the film was completed in time for the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where it was selected to play as the prestigious opening-night gala. Given the hellish circumstances of its conception, it would be more than understandable if Water played as an angry film by a filmmaker with something to prove. But as Mehta explained during an interview at TIFF, she had a self-imposed mandate to keep her emotions in check.
"I’m a director," she says, "but I’m also a person. And anger adds another agenda, which has nothing to do with the part of being a director. (Anger) would be my own personal agenda. And that’s why it was very important that it be dissipated. The reason I would be doing the film would be different. Instead of doing it for script and characters I really cared for, I would be doing it for other reasons – like I was angry – because we had been shut down. It would have been for some kind of vindication. Which is not the right way to approach it. And then when (the anger) dissipated there was clarity. I was no longer looking at it from a distorted prism."
She can leave the vindication to others because Water is the best film of her career to date. And while the director’s decision to downplay her anger is evident, so too is her overwhelming passion. While anger obfuscates, passion illuminates, and Water’s goal is to shed light on a dark period in India’s history.
The story is set in the 1930s and concerns an eight-year-old girl, Chuyia (newcomer Sarala) who is sent to an ashram after the death of her adult husband. In accordance with Hindu holy texts, hers is a life sentence. The expectation is that Chuyia will spend the rest of her days in penitence, grieving for a man she never really knew.
Water remains focused on Chuyia for its duration, but Mehta’s elegantly structured screenplay foregrounds several other key personalities. The most prominent is Kalyani (Lisa Ray), a young widow who acts as a surrogate sister to Chuyia. Unlike her fellow widows, Kalyani has not been forced to cut her hair. She’s allowed to maintain her appearance so that she can be used as a prostitute, servicing wealthy clients to help keep the ashram financially solvent. Her plight is simultaneously ameliorated and intensified when she meets and is attracted to Narayana (John Abraham), a handsome law student whose progressive ideals – he’s a follower of Gandhi, much to the consternation of his conservative parents – motivate him to pursue their circumstantially impossible relationship.
It’s a scenario that could easily congeal into melodrama, but thankfully, Water never overextends its emotional pull. Mehta acknowledges that this sense of restraint is something of a new development in her work.
She says that while she’s proud of all of her films, Water has resulted in a pleasing sense of closure. She’s currently developing several new projects, but indicates her five-year ordeal was what put her in a position to move on. Fittingly, she uses an elemental metaphor to clarify her feelings.
"With Water, it was flowing," she says of her muse. "It was flowing, and now," she says, making a splashing gesture with her hands, "it’s gone." |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.