WATER

“Water” (Deepa Mehta, 2005)

“A woman who is unfaithful to her husband is reborn in the womb of a jackal”(The Laws of Manu)

Chuyia’s husband dies so her family sends her to a widows’ ashram where she is to spend the rest of her life. Only that Chuyia is a little girl of about 7. They shave off her long beautiful hair and leave her among bald women in rags, to share their austere life. They expect that she would offer senseless devotion to a husband she never knew and to a tradition she is too young to embrace willingly. She keeps asking for her mother and wants nothing more than to return home. Among the other scary widows, as different in character as the many inhabitants of an inferno she meets Kalyani, a beautiful young widow, the only one who for some reason keeps her hair.

The story is placed in India in 1938, in a time in which the name of GandHi was starting to be heard. Widow houses survive through the hideous practice of prostituting one of them to the rich. In this case, it becomes the duty of Kalyani, thus the beautiful hair still on her head and her looks. From a miserable state she almost reaches salvation in the possibility of marrying a young handsome and liberal aristocrat. He’s ready to pursue his love in spite of his higher caste, but as the two elope, she realizes she’s been selling her services to her future father-in-law. Kalyani finds her end in the arms of the sacred river Ganges, deciding to commit suicide, aware that the desired escape is an illusion.

The film’s beautiful scenery and music are only matched by the deep sadness of the storyline. The ending brings a minuscule ray of light, the teaching of Gandhi enlightening one of the widows into helping Chuyia to escape. Albeit half dead after having been molested, as she becomes the replacement of Kalyani through a trick of the widows.

There’s no controversy about arranged marriages in the film, but the pressure of society and tradition making women live as half-dead is poignantly carried across. The film is obviously not Bollywood, but Canadian! It was actually banned in India, although it addresses a still existing social problem and the dire life of a demographically expanding society, the drama of cultural idiosyncrasies reinforcing the cycle of poverty. In spite of the title, "water" is not an environmental film, but it deals with a large-scale phenomenon, “There are over 34 million widows in India according to the 2001 census. Many continue to live in conditions of social, economic and cultural deprivation as prescribed 2000 years ago by the Sacred Texts of Manu.”

Nominated for Oscar

Imdb rating: 7.6