Water
Written and directed by Deepa Mehta, Water is a film that will leave you thirsty for a script. It, at best, is a shoddy waste of time if a worthy addition to the con-artist cinema of the Orient. The story centres the chubby-cheeked eight-year-old Chuyia, whose father wakes her up:
“Do you remember getting married?” he says.
“No,” she replies.
“Your husband died. You’re a widow now.”
“For how long?” she asks.
Remarkably, the child claims not to remember having been married, even though her husband will have attacked her on their wedding night. Her head shaved, Chuyia is dumped into the hands of a refuge for widows.
(Oddly, one elderly widow there seems only to remember her wedding night, and the sweets she received then.)
The refuge is controlled by a matriarch-cum-brothel madam, who forces a fair-skinned, beautiful, European-looking woman called Kalya into sex work. Kalya befriends Chuyia, introducing her to her puppy – which she is allowed to keep along with her long hair.
When Chuyia goes running after her dog, she bumps into Narayan a liberal young Brahmin, who is more 1990s Islington yuppy than 1930s Indian nationalist. The upper caste/outcast love story that emerges is so clinical, shallow and unmoving that divulging what happens next will detract nothing from the film.
Narayan finds out that his father is one of his wife-to-be’s clients (a great twist had any of the characters depth – “You disgust me” he tells papa). Still, he decides he still wants her.
Only too late, Kalyani kills herself. (All this against the lusciously shot backdrop of a mystical India filled with wailing, sitars, and, for a welcome dose of realism, men scrubbing their armpits in rivers.) The evil matriarch sends little Chuyia to be one of Kalyani’s clients who is an Anglophile as well as a paedophile.
Chuyia is helped off a boat, back from her ordeal, by the film’s third female heroin Shakuntula. Audience sympathy is, by this point, fast running out. So what do you do to retain it? Wheel out Gandhi of course. Yes, folks, the last scene of this film shows the Mahatma making a – surprise, surprise – weakly scripted speech to a wooden audience in a train station.
He boards the train, which Shakuntula, who takes it upon herself to deliver the deflated Chuyia the great man, chases. Conveniently she spots Narayan to whom she manages to hand the child with the instruction, get her to Gandhi! Poor old Gandhi not only liberated India, but also the director of this charlatan of a film from having to think of a proper ending.
