Water

[Ravi]

Water was the opening film of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Official Site, with trailer

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5053447

Deep trouble

Oct 20th 2005 | BUSAN, SOUTH KOREA
From The Economist print edition
An Indian film stars at the world's biggest festival of Asian film




"WATER" is the third part of an elemental trilogy by Deepa Mehta, an Indian director with a reputation for liking hot potatoes. "Fire", one of her earlier films, tackled lesbianism, and "Earth", the still sensitive subject of India's partition.

In "Water", she turns to the plight of India's widows, who are often regarded as non-persons. Though suttee has been illegal for a long time, many widows still suffer under an extreme interpretation of a 2,000-year-old Hindu tradition whereby a wife is half of her husband and when he dies, she is in effect half-dead too, and should be consigned to an ashram or house of confinement.

After the script of "Water" was passed by India's official censor in 2000, shooting began in the holy city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. However, Hindu fundamentalists were quick to protest, burning down the main set and seizing and destroying all prints and the original negative of the film. With no insurance cover, Ms Mehta had to abandon her project. But she remained undaunted, and spent the next few years raising the money to shoot the film again. A Canadian businessman came to the rescue and "Water" was remade in Sri Lanka, using a bogus working title as a precaution. It also required a new cast since one of the leading characters, a child, had grown into an adolescent in the interim.
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Was it all worth it? Absolutely. "Water" combines a humanist message, political courage and visual poetry in a way not seen since the death of Satyajit Ray. It is the finest Indian film for a generation.

The story is told through the eyes of a six-year-old girl who is sent to an ashram after the husband she had barely known suddenly dies. Still a child, all she craves is her mother, but even this is denied her. The child's story is paralleled with that of another widow, who falls in love with and expects to marry a high-caste idealist but commits suicide when his father advises him not to rock the boat and to take her as a mistress instead.

The film is set in the 1930s against India's growing independence movement, and its conclusion is more upbeat than you might expect. Mahatma Gandhi, on a stop at the local station, makes an impassioned call for reform which inspires the child-bride and the now bereaved lover to flee the town together and accompany Gandhi to a brighter future.

Like "La Terra Trema" and "The Battleship Potemkin", "Water" uses great artistry to challenge orthodox views. It is in the grand humanist tradition of Ray, Ms Mehta's mentor, and Vittorio De Sica. The young girl who brings a wizened and dying widow a piece of fruit to see her safely into the next world is a tribute to Ray's first film "Pather Panchali". Ms Mehta was applauded last week at the tenth Pusan film festival. Ray would have been proud.

[Ravi]

http://rediff.com/movies/2005/nov/24water.htm

John Abraham: In the SRK, Saif league in US?

Arthur J Pais | November 24, 2005 18:59 IST

John Abraham, a relatively unknown name in North America till the other day, would soon join the likes of Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan in the million dollar box office club, thanks to two of his films.

He shares the limelight with Akshay Kumar in Garam Masala heading for $1-million target in USA. The film achieved that target in the United Kingdom in about three weeks.

In Canada, Deepa Mehta's Water -- in which Abraham plays a reformist Gandhian lawyer -- is heading for $1 million in the next few days. The critically acclaimed film, which was shot in Sri Lanka with no publicity following the agitation by conservative Hindus in India against it over four years ago, opened in 11 theatres in a handful of Canadian cities on November 4.

The Hindi language film, which deals with widow remarriage in India in the 1930s, grossed about $150,000  in three days. Next weekend, it was shown in 41 theatres and by November 14, it grossed $450,000, according to distributor Mongrel Media, By November 21, the film's gross stood at about $700,000.

Fox Searchlight will release the film, which opened the Toronto International Film Festival in September, either in late
February or early March in a handful of cities in the US and slowly expand it across the country.

Set in 1938 Colonial India against Mahatma Gandhi's rise as a social reformer, the story of Water begins when eight-year-old Chuyia (newcomer Sarla) is widowed and sent to a home where the widows must live in penitence. But Chuyia's rebellious and feisty presence affects the lives of the other residents, including a young widow (Lisa Ray), who falls for Narayana, a Gandhian.

When Abraham was asked at TIFF if he ever felt he was risking his career acting in the film, particularly due to the agitation which shut down its production in India, he asserted that having Mehta's name on his curriculum vitae was far more important than any other consideration.

Abraham received quite a bit of attention during his weeklong stay in Toronto during the TIFF.

Mongrel Media, which had distributed Mehta's Bollywood/Hollywood in Canada over two years ago, treated her new, subtitled film as if it were a mainstream Canadian film. Its recent art-house hits include Capote which may pick up a handful of Oscar nominations.

Apart from placing advertisements in Indian publications, radio and television, Mongrel advertised the film with television spots on mainstream channels. It issued a glossy insert in the nationally sold The Globe and Mail a week after the film was released, and just before it was going to add more theaters.

"With Water, we felt that we had a very special film," Tom Alexander, Mongrel's director of theatrical releasing, said. "We wanted to give it the best slots in the country and let people know it is a very special and important film. We began our ads many days before the film's release. The idea was to create a slow build through every channel we could."

"We feel the film has done very well and exceeded our expectations," Alexander told trade publications as Water was about to enter its fourth week. "Our strategy is to keep the film alive and going as long as we can."

[MacGuffin]

Filmmaker back in her element
In "Water," Deepa Mehta continues the examination of Indian society she began with "Fire" and "Earth."
By Tina Daunt, Los Angeles Times

The movie sets were torched by Hindu extremists on the banks of India's Ganges River.

There were death threats — so many that director Deepa Mehta was forced to hire bodyguards. Images of her were burned on the streets.
 
She had only six minutes of film completed on her movie, "Water," when the production was shut down in 2000 by the Indian government amid threats of more violence. Critics claimed that the story, which depicts dire conditions in a Hindu widows' ashram, was blasphemous.

Frustrated, Mehta returned home to Toronto, where she has lived since leaving India in 1973. She put the screenplay in a box and left it on a shelf until she was able to let go of her anger. It took her four years to resume the project.

"The film is so fragile, to impose my anger on it would have really distorted it," said Mehta, who ultimately made the movie in Sri Lanka in 2004 under a fake name, "Full Moon." "It's a story about hope, and that has to come through. Anger and hope just don't work together."

On Friday, the movie — Mehta's fifth feature film — opens in theaters in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. It's already opened in Canada, Australia and Spain, to much acclaim. And it screened last month at the Bombay Film Festival, where reaction was surprisingly positive, Mehta said.

The New Delhi-born Mehta is hopeful that "Water" will be shown throughout India later this year. Either way, she has secured her place as a voice of a new India. "Water" is the third installment in Mehta's elemental trilogy, which included "Fire" (1996) and "Earth" (1998) — controversial films that also explore gender disparity and religious turmoil.

The movie is set in 1930s colonial India, when young girls were often married to older men to secure their family's financial existence. Eight-year-old Chuyia — played by a young Sri Lankan actress, Sarala — has little memory of her wedding when her family informs her that her husband has died. In accordance to Hindu laws, she is taken to a widows' ashram — a dismal, gloomy place. Her head is shaved — a sign that she is a widow who must spend the rest of her days suffering and grieving for a man she never knew.

Chuyia rebels. Her youthful determination has a strong effect on the other widows, especially the devout Shakuntala (Seema Biswas) and the beautiful Kalyani (Lisa Ray), a woman forced into prostitution to support the ashram. Kalyani is pursued by a handsome village intellectual (Bollywood star John Abraham) who wants to free her.

Mehta said she came up with the idea for the movie 10 years ago, after she saw an old widow on the steps of the Ganges River. The woman was "bent like a shrimp, her body wizened with age, white hair shaved to her scalp, she scampered on all fours, and furiously looking for something she had lost." Passersby ignored the widow, even when she sat down to cry, as if talking to her would bring bad luck.

"I was curious about this," said Mehta in an interview recently outside a Brentwood coffee shop. "I wanted to know more."

She discovered that although some of the widows' homes had been shut down in India, there were many still in existence. And the conditions were shocking. "I ended up spending a lot of time in widows' houses," she said. "What was palpable was the despair. But it never ceased to surprise me, the ability of the women to survive."

She wrote the screenplay on her kitchen table in her small Victorian house in Toronto. She would get up early in the morning, make herself a cup of Earl Grey tea, light a Rothman cigarette, and write — longhand — in a spiral notebook.

Mehta's father owned a cinema in India when she was young, so pursuing a film career seemed very natural for her. (She remembers getting dressed up on Sundays to go watch the latest American movie, usually something starring Elvis Presley.)

She acted a little, and then after immigrating to Canada, she met and married Paul Saltzman, a Canadian film producer and director. They started a small company producing documentaries, television series and, eventually, feature films.

In 1992, Mehta caught the eye of George Lucas, who brought her in to work on "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." After that, she found herself prominently on Hollywood's radar.

In "Water," Mehta said she wanted to show the sorrow of the widows, but also their spirit. Early reviews have credited cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, also a Lucas protégé, with capturing the scene with a poetic lushness. Composer Mychael Danna (known for his recent work on "Capote" and the upcoming "Little Miss Sunshine") did the score, drawing on the themes of traditional Indian folk music.

The movie has received rave reviews worldwide. "Mehta herself has clearly progressed, honing her cinematic skills to the point where, here, she manages to do what her native country never has: Forge a cohesive unity, a colorful marriage of content to style," movie reviewer Rick Groen wrote in November in Canada's Globe and Mail.

Mehta said she has found the positive response "overwhelming." Her cast has found it heartening as well. Ray, one of the stars of the movie, said people asked her if she really wanted to get involved in making "Water," considering the controversy.

"I said, 'Bring it on.' This is even a more compelling reason to be involved with this. We need to support freedom of expression. I think this film is really a testament to that," she said. "It's a strange thing, filmmaking. It requires a sort of alchemy. It's hard to predict how a film will do, but on a gut level you know when something special is happening. That's how we felt about this."

[pete]

finally saw it.  I was a bit resistent at first, just because some of the scenes, and the acting, and the music, amongst other things, felt contrived and unoriginal.  the love story was a complete disaster, the little girl played cute at times, and the eunuch was quite one-dimensional.  however, the story took a totally different turn towards the end and became something very powerful, a little disturbing, but also very memorable.  Seema Biswas was heads and shoulders above all the other actors in the film, and I was glad that it wasn't an accident.  to move a supporting character into the foreground is quite rare, and to have it done so beautifully and poignantly is even rarer.  what a surprise.

[Ravi]

I forgot I even started a thread on this.  I saw this movie last week. 

finally saw it. I was a bit resistent at first, just because some of the scenes, and the acting, and the music, amongst other things, felt contrived and unoriginal.

Some of this film was ripped right out of Satyajit Ray films.  The girl giving the old woman a sweet was just like Durga giving the old woman a fruit in Pather Panchali.  Narayan falling in love with the widow was just like one of the stories in Ray's Teen Kanya, where a young man falls in love with a local tomboy, much to his mother's consternation.

The score sounded like Titanic at times.

the love story was a complete disaster, the little girl played cute at times, and the eunuch was quite one-dimensional. however, the story took a totally different turn towards the end and became something very powerful, a little disturbing, but also very memorable. Seema Biswas was heads and shoulders above all the other actors in the film, and I was glad that it wasn't an accident. to move a supporting character into the foreground is quite rare, and to have it done so beautifully and poignantly is even rarer. what a surprise.

Seema Biswas's character was particularly interesting because at first she is presented as this hard-hearted woman, but grows to care for Chuya and even questions whether she has to live this kind of life.  The background of the Indian freedom movement lent more layers to the story, though I didn't like how the entire movement was represented by Gandhi.  That part of the story should have been more complex.

[MacGuffin]

Deepa Mehta Helming The Julia Project
Source: Variety

Water helmer Deepa Mehta will direct Focus Features' The Julia Project (working title). The biopic focuses on Julia Mullock, an American interior designer who married the last crown prince of Korea.

Mullock met Kyu Lee in New York in the 1950s, after Japanese colonization and subsequent independence had removed the royal family from any official function in Korea. After marrying, the couple lived in Hawaii and then moved to Seoul.

In 1982, Lee divorced Mullock under pressure from his family due to the lack of an heir. He died last year; she lives in Hawaii.