Deepa Mehta has concluded her Trilogy of Movies namely starting with Fire and Earth and aptly concluding it with Water. Though I have not seen Fire so can’t comment on that but having seen 1947 Earth umpteen number of times, it was sheer brilliance with awesome cinematography and superb acting by all the characters.
Now coming to Water, it is the same movie which created a controversy back in 2000 when she started shooting the movie in Varanasi but the Indian Fundamentalist Organization RSS abrupted the shooting and Deepa Mehta had to shelve the plans of making the Film. That time the lead actors were Shabana Azmi, Nandita Sen and Akshay Kumar. She finally secretly shot the film in Sri Lanka with a different name River Moon and then the movie was first shown in the Toronto Film Festival in September 2005.
The Plot:
It is a movie based in 1938 India and shows Varanasi and the Ganges in its beautiful hue and colours though mostly white but with some dashes of colour. The movie starts with Chuiya (Acted brilliantly by Debut Child Artiste Sarala) becoming a widow and her parents leaving her at an Ashram for Widows where 14 women live in an old house and living in very poor conditions, the ashram is headed by an old aged woman Madhumati (Played by Vamp of yesteryears- Manorama) who is a cunning and a wicked woman, her only friend is an eunuch Gulabi (Raghubir Yadav) who also is a pimp and helps Madhumati to prostitute Kalyani (Lisa Ray) . One another character is Shakuntala (Seema Biswas) who has the enigma amongst all and everybody in the ashram reveres her. She is always quiet and reserved and is always caught between confusions of why she is facing so many sorrows. Then enters a young and charming man Narayan (John Abraham) who falls in love with Lisa Ray and then the movie travels across their path and the twists their fates face. I wont talk more about the movie but let you all watch it for yourself.
Some Snippets:
There is a widow who keeps talking about her young days when she used to love sweets but in the ashram she is not allowed to and when Chuiya gets her a laddoo without letting anybody know and the happiness on her face has been shot brilliantly and is very touching.
The first meeting scene between Lisa Ray and John Abraham has been shot brilliantly in the night showing awesome visual hues of Diyas and the virgin night.
The Holi Scene where the widows play with colours with utmost gay abandon and even the cunning Madhumati enjoying it.
The climax scene is extremely touching and a fitting finale to the brilliant movie.
Overall the Cinematography of the movie is smashing and it plays an integral part in the brilliance of the film.
The Music of the film is also extremely good and unsurprisingly it’s by the Maestro A R Rahman with lyrics by Sukhwinder Singh.
The Background Music of the movie also adds in enhancing the appeal of Water.
The Characters:
The movie clearly signifies that John Abraham is a very good actor and can seamlessly play any role be it Action, Comedy or a serious one and this movie finally negates the common belief of “Models can’t Act” .
Seema Biswas once again gives a powerhouse performance and inspite of not having much dialogues in the movie, her intense eyes do most of the talking. A brilliant performance for sure.
Lisa Ray has her accent problems being a Canadian but she plays her role pretty well.
The find of this movie is Sarala, the young girl in the movie, the transformation of her from being a stubborn girl to a friend of Lisa Ray has been acted superbly and it must be attributed to Deepa Mehta’s directorial Skills.
Overall this movie is brilliant though I am sure it won’t do well in the Indian Market and has been mainly made for the Foreign Market and International Film Festivals but it leaves quite an impact on the viewer and shows the horrendous past of India where baseless beliefs were blindly followed and so many lives were painfully wasted by the Indian Caste System.
My final say is this movie has Brilliant Direction, Great Acting, beautiful cinematography, awesome music and lovely locales. So all of you please watch the movie.
Hope you liked the review, after a long time I have written a Movie Review on MS, Hope all of you have found it interesting.