Deepa Mehta's Fire and Water

Canadian film director Deepa Mehta is once again in hot Water, with her new film, Water, which opens at the Toronto Film Festival. This is the third film in her trilogy of Fire, Eart, Water (Fire, the film with lesbian content, is reviewed below). Water is the story of the mistreatment of widows, who were forced to choose between prostitution or starvation. The set was burned and thrown in the river, protesters threatened the director's life, going as far as to say "the people involved with the film should have been beaten black and blue." The same group said that people of the world did not need to hear of the problems faced by widows in India, and that this was a money-making ploy (Mehta makes so little money, she had to mortgage her house to try and make this film). One group even hired a professional suicide attempter (who knew there were such people!) to disrupt filming (he'd been hired more than a half-dozen times before by other groups for other reasons). More on the disruptions can be found here.


Fire was an even more controversial film in India. The film locations were sources of protest. Hell, they even burned down a movie theatre that was showing Fire, because they didn't like the way India was depicted. Right, like burning down a film theatre makes us think so much more of you...

Anyway...

Fire is a brilliant film, and if you haven't seen it, rented it or stolen it yet, well, let's just say it's a must-have in any good lesbian DVD collection. In an extended household, Radha and Sita are sisters-in-law who both share unhappy marriages. They fall in love, and challenge traditions in a culture that has no word for Lesbianism.

The newly wed Sita (Nandita Das) is a gorgeous, hip woman who comes to live with her husband's brother and his wife Rahda (Shabana Azmi) in New Dehli. Restless, modern and independent, she realizes that her arranged-marriage husband is far from faithful (and he runs a porn shop on the side). The slightly older Rahda, on the other hand, offers the face of complacency, all the while holding in her righteous rage at a husband who won't touch her and a mother-in-law who hates her. Throw in an assistant who masturbates in front of the mother-in-law, and you've got a volitile situation. Within this environment the two women strike up a natural friendship which leads to smoldering passions and a sensual but secretive romance.

(spolier ahead)

We have all heard the idea that in India, when a husband is bored with his wife or when her family cannot pay the dowry, he sets her to fire to kill her (accidentally, of course). In Fire, Rahda accidentally catches her robes on the open-flame stove, and the cloth goes up pretty quickly. Her husband chooses to rescue his mother, rather than her (actually, he could easily douse her and have it over with, but wants to let her burn). Played out before us (and explained within the film, of course), is the myth of the burning woman who is saved only by pure love -- we watch every painful step Radha takes to find Sita, her pure love.

Damn! What a great film!