WATER
Movie (2005), 117 min
Director: Deepa Mehta
What if you were a girl married at eight, and what if your husband died right after that? In India in 1938, and to some extent today, or so I read, you would be condemned to a life as a widow, forbidden to be “with men” again, and probably forced into poverty because the family you left doesn’t want you back. You cost too much.
So, as in “Water,” you might enter a sort of convent full of widows without means, there to grow old and die cut off from the rest of society. Chuyia (Sarala), an eight-year-old girl, is left in such a place, at a temple in a holy city, Varanasi. Beautiful Kalyani (Lisa Ray) befriends Chuyia as Chuyia fights against her confinement in that place. “Where do the men widows go?” she demands, to dismayed put-downs from the older widows.
Kalyani makes the acquaintance of a high-caste young man, a follower of Mahatma Ghandi, who uses a willing Chuyia as a message-bearer. The setting of the temple, beside a beautiful river rimmed with bath structures and apparent riverside patios, is evocative of old India, and the sound track, full of pipe and sitar music, does the rest. It’s a beautiful thing to watch the players glide from stair to stair down to the water to bathe, or to think, or to talk.
The ending Mehta devises is sad but inevitable. The movie is constructed so well that the inevitable is no surprise; though we know in an American film such an ending would not sell.
I hated the content of “Water” but loved the reflective quality of locations, costume, and sound as presented here. For a late night when you cannot stand your life, this is a good movie to watch. You will observe a life you really could not stand.
