Water (2005)

Review by All Movie Guide
According to her daughter Devyani Saltzman's memoir, Shooting Water, director Deepa Mehta had an enormously difficult time producing the final entry of her Elemental Trilogy. Shooting in the Indian holy city of Varanasi was initially forced to shut down after Hindu fundamentalists and officials with the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh party raised objects to its criticism of Hindu society. (It was really manufactured by an election-year desire to drive voters to the booths through hysteria.) The film was eventually completed four years later in Sri Lanka. Had anyone bothered to read the script, they would have immediately understood how misguided their passions were. Water is a deeply felt drama about women in ridiculously horrible circumstances, and its social criticism, a Dickensian exposé on the poverty and societal oppression associated with widow's ashrams, shouldn't disagree with anybody with an ounce of sympathy toward humanity. True to the theme of the cycle, Mehta shoots the film in a straightforward manner; the story, characters, and theme are clear; and though it takes place in a specific time period and political atmosphere, the solidity of the drama lends the film a timeless universality. The actresses are uniformly excellent, particularly Sarala, who is both headstrong and vulnerable, as befits a child, and Seema Biswas, whose character gradually emerges as the film's heroine as she discovers her quiet reserves of inner strength. The romance between the prostitute widow Kalyani (Lisa Ray) and an idealistic rich Gandhian Narayan (John Abraham) teeters on overwrought artifice, but is saved by a moving and satisfying conclusion. ~ Michael Buening, All Movie Guide