Water

Lisa Ray as Kalyani in Deepa Mehta's 'Water'.

Herald rating: * * *

The third film in a trilogy that anatomises modern India through minutely specific stories is the most controversial. Fire (1996) was a throbbing tale of forbidden lesbian love; Earth (1998) was a film of more sorrow than anger about the violence that followed partition in 1947.

Water, by contrast, burns with rage at the ancient tradition that a widow has three choices: to leap on to her dead husband's funeral pyre; to marry his brother; or to withdraw into lifelong ascetic isolation in an ashram with fellow outcasts.

The customs are now nominally banned - though very far from being eradicated - and Mehta's film, set in 1938 when the teachings of Gandhi are just beginning to have an impact, is nominally a period piece. But it simmers with fury at the hidebound conservatism of strict Hindu belief.

In a chilling confirmation of the accuracy of her analysis, Mehta - a Canadian-based expatriate - received death threats and her set was repeatedly vandalised, forcing her to abandon the 2000 shoot.

Four years later, she started again, recreating in Sri Lanka the holy city of Varanasi. What has emerged is a work of beguiling beauty. At moments recalling the socially engaged film-making of the great Satyajit Ray, it works as a protest film and, in its final scenes, as a poetic allegory about the fate of India in the post-colonial era.

It opens as 8-year-old Chuyia (the entrancing Sarala) learns she has been widowed. She is too young to appreciate that she was married but this does not save her from consignment to the widows' ashram.

It is within this cloistered place that most of the film is set, as Mehta introduces a cast of characters as richly eccentric as those in a Dickens novel: the foul-mouthed, pot-smoking house mother (Manorama); the eunuch pimp (Yadav) who trades the favours of the radiant Kalyani (Ray) to wealthy Brahmins to finance the ashram; and the devout Shakuntula (Biswas) whose belief that the ashram is part of the natural order of things is shaken to its core.

The story that unfolds has the simple symmetry and power of a fairy tale, and Mehta tells it superbly, assisted by Giles Nuttgens' patient and watchful cinematography. But after the appearance of a handsome law student and Gandhi acolyte (Abraham) the film takes off in another direction. It becomes a love story in which the handsome prince saves the damsel in distress. All at once, the film's beauty looks cloying and cliched, although a dramatic finale rescues matters slightly.

Water is an engrossing and wonderful watch with some fine performances but in the end it feels like a film that lost its nerve.

Cast: Seema Biswas, Lisa Ray, John Abraham, Sarala, Manorama, Raghuvir Yadav
Director: Deepa Mehta
Running time: 117 mins
Rating: M
Screening: Bridgeway, Lido, Rialto
Verdict: A fine, politically charged drama about the outcast widows of India loses its focus in the final third to become a cloying love story.