Water

Little Chuhiya becomes a widow before she knows what it is to be a child, leave alone a wife. It is the 1930s in an India which treats its widows as non-persons, worse than the untouchables that an on-the-ascendant Gandhi is trying to uplift: to be dustbinned till they die.

Deepa Mehta8217;s last of her trilogy after Fire, Earth uses the vivacious innocence of her child actor to show us a fictional village by the Ganga, which is like hundreds of others of its time: inhabited by all-powerful zamindars, cravenly supporting the British overlords, spreading corruption like a virus through the local populace, counterpointing the abject helplessness of the women who are living out their lives in the vidhva-ashram.

Water settles down slowly. You have to fight against the feeling of faint artifice it induces: it8217;s not a Film City set, but neither it is Benaras, where the film was originally meant to be shot. It has been shot mainly in Sri Lanka, so the water, the trees and the people in the background are distinctly not North Indian.

The choice of the lead pair only adds to it. Both John and Lisa turn a tad awkward in their diction and body language: it is one thing for Mr Abraham8217;s Gandhian Narayan to wear a dhoti-kurta and spout a Sanskrit shloka, it is quite another to infuse complete life into the role. Lisa8217;s Kalyani is gorgeous if a little alien, not just in the fact that she is the only one who has long, flowing tresses: why, if all the other widows including Chuhiya, have either shaved or closely-cropped heads, has Kalyani been allowed to keep hers?

The director overcomes all of this with an unswerving commitment to the spirit of her story: Water is stunning because it is so quiet. The devastating unfairness of the lives of women interred in darkness widows are meant to feed on scraps, sleep on stone floors, and be neither seen nor heard, intertwined with the tragic love story of Narayan and Kalyani is played out without a hint of melodrama only wish the background score hadn8217;t been as intrusive. The horror visited upon Chuhiya is all the more heartbreaking because of the silence it is accomplished with.

But Mehta8217;s most accomplished movie till now leaves us with hope and redemption, as Chuhiya is borne away from the town by Narayan. And superb performances from Raghuvir Yadav as the hijda/procurer, Seema Biswas as the woman who sees the light, and Sarala, the Sri Lankan girl who plays Chuhiya, a natural-born winner.

And the music, very period, by AR Rahman.