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by
Subhash K Jha Starring Seema Biswas, John Abraham, Lisa Ray,
Vinay Pathak, Manorama, Sarala, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Raghuvir
Yadav
Written & Directed by Deepa Mehta
Rating: ****
½
What do you say about a film that hits you
hard where it hurts the most, so hard that it takes your breath
away.
Water belongs to that rare category of
films that have the power to re-define the parameters of cinema,
to re-align the function and purpose of the medium, and to
re-structure the way we, the audience look at the motion
-picture experience.
It's no coincidence that Deepa Mehta's
heroine is named Kalyani . Lisa Ray as the tragic but irradiant
widow seems to echo Nutan's Kalyani in Bimal Roy's Bandini.
The tragic grandeur that Water wears on its resplendent sleeve
is a quality that sets it apart from other reformist dramas.
The film has a great deal to say about the plight of
socio-economically challenged women, specifically the widows of
Varanasi in the 1930s. The burning
ghats and the waters that flow from them, symbolize the
ashes-and-embers predicament of Deepa's ashram-bound women
.all
plagued by the pathos of dereliction, deprivation and yes,
prostitution.
In telling it like it is, Mehta never filches. When has she ever
done that?! Her elemental trilogy(Fire, Earth & Water) reflects
a harshly uncompromising sensibility. In Water Mehta doesn't
beautify the brutality of the widows' existence.
There are bouts of humour, dance and music(watch Lisa Ray and
little Sarala dance around their dingy room as the rain splashes
romantically on the parched streets down below, or the eruption
of Holi revelry in the ashram).
A quality of luminous lyricism runs through the narration,
specially in the romantic interludes between Narayan(John
Abraham) and Kalyani(Lisa Ray) which are designed like a
modern-day re-working of the Radha-Krishna mythology.
The sheer purity and beauty of the central romance contrasts
tellingly with the squalidity of the lives and settings that the
plot negotiates with such slender but deft steps.
Whether it's in capturing the layer after emotional layer in
this onion of a drama or in juxtaposing sequences of the
shimmering river with the run-down ashram, Giles Nuttgen's
camera doesn't flinch from the beauty and the grime. The
cinematography could've easily converted the multi-layered
character-study into a touristic over-view.
Nuttgen takes us into the darkest areas of the human condition
to search for the peace that prevails under the panic of
existence. And A.R Rahman's music, his best in (y)ears, uplifts
the mood of tragic pathos to the sphere of sublimity.
Many moments in Water would comfortably qualify as Pure Cinema.
That moment when the oldest woman in the ashram devours a laddoo
that she had been craving for all her life could be seen as the
most satirically tragic juncture in a film on soci-culturally
challenged lives.
Water as the giver and the destroyer
that's the predominant
metaphor that cuts through heart of the fragile but for tale.
Each time we see the porcelain Kalyani peep out of her
dungeon-like window, we know she's searching for a horizon that
most of us never find in our lifetime.
Water contours and defines those glazed regions in our history
that we would rather not sharp-focus on. In many ways its
depiction of the plight of abandoned
widows is a metaphor for the condition of
women across the world, and also a microcosmic view of the human
condition.
In one way or another we are all persecuted and haunted.
A film like Water comes once in a while to negotiate that
seemingly insurmountable space between desire and longing,
between love and rituals. As in all works of true art, no
character in Water is big or small. They're all played by actors
who know what needs to be done, and how to bridge that gap
between delusional reality and illusional artistry.
The fine cast grabs your undivided attention. Seasoned
performers like Manorama (playing the head of the ashram she's a
conniving scheming farting mass of vulgarity and self-interest),
Seema Biswas (clenched controlled conflicted by fundamentalism
and the Gandhian reformist that assails her existence) and
Raghuvir Yadav(a whoop as a singing eunuch) blend beautifully
with the central love story embodied with supreme sensitivity in
the John-Lisa pair.
And to think that we always thought of John and Lisa as actors
incapable of overcoming their inherent urbanity!
It's Sarala as little Chuhiya whom you'll find hard to get out
of your head. She is the most credible child performer,on a par
with Ayesha Kapoor in Sanjay Bhansali's Black. Normally children
in films respond to adult situations in an unnaturally knowing
way. Chuhiya remains a child caught in a frightening world of
persecution and perversion.
Like bolts of blue feelings, Deepa Mehta inter-cuts the wretched
lives of the characters with glimmers of hope. Even when Mahatma
Gandhi makes an unexpected appearance at the end the director
doesn't allow her vision of poetry to be crowded by postures of
polemics.
While you grieve for these doomed disintegrating lives, you
cannot miss the subtext of social reform that underlines their
lives.
The hallmark of a true work of art is the level of sublimity it
achieves in its characterizations while conveying thoughts on
the quality of lives. What Deepa Mehta has to say about the
plight of women in India 60 years ago remains true to this day.
Hopefully things will change before another 60 years pass.
Water leaves us with much hope, and some frightening misgivings.
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