Water

Deepa Mehta's WATER is beautiful, touching, and topical . It pulled me into its world and made me want to stay.

WATER centers on Chuyia, and eight-year-old in '30s India. Chuyia's parents married her to some guy at an age so young she doesn't even remember the ceremony, which (I suppose) was standard practice. But then the guy dies, and Chuyia's an eight-year-old widow in a country in which a widow's options are (a) throw herself on her husband's funeral pyre, (b) marry her husband's younger brother, or (c) join an ashram and spend the rest of her life in servitude, foregoing her wants and needs and being seen as a cursed woman. Chuyia's parents go with (c), dumping the poor girl at an ashram from which, she's sure, her mother will come to get her any day now.

That's about the first ten minutes. As we follow Chuyia's life and the lives of those she meets, we get a glimpse into another world, one from which we're separated by distance and time, and Mehta and her collaborators make that world come alive with rich colors, lush cinematography, and fine performances. The film, made in Sri Lanka after its Indian sets burned down, boasts images which deserve framing and hanging, the kind of stuff you rewind just to bask in, all while hewing to the requirements of Hindi film: WATER works in two musical numbers, but they're so subtle and so carefully done that they don't serve as holidays from the movie; rather, they enhance it. Further, WATER makes its holy city of Varansi look inviting and intimidating and exotic, like a dream of India. It creates a full world beyond the frame, one in which Ghandi's coming and people feel compelled to reevaluate their politics, their faiths, their very lives in anticipation of great changes on the horizon.

But for all that, the movie wouldn't work if we didn't believe in the people we found there. And I believed in the people in WATER. From Chuyia, played by the extraordinary child actress Sarala with an earthly reality that's rare in the film of any nation, to Seema Biswas as Shakuntala, an older widow beginning to question her faith and her lifelong devotion to millenia-old proscriptions. The film takes a slight misstep with the two characters involved in its love story, Kalyani (Lisa Ray) and Narayan (John Abraham), who appear to be in love merely because they're the two best looking people in India, but I accepted their relationship anyway because, hey, they're the two best looking people in India. As these people, and the people near them, live on the screen, I grew to care about them, to invest in them, and to continue to wish them well after the end credits rolled.

And though the film is set in the '30s, it's still topical. As an end title informs us, thousands of Indian widows are forced to live in ashrams today, unaware that they're legally able to lead any lives they choose, even to remarry. WATER challenges this injustice not through haranguing, but through humanizing. As such, it gives life to the issue and motivates us to consider those aspects of our own lives that are dead fossils of the past. This is a film that works on every level. I'm glad my wife put it in my hands.