Water

Deepa Mehta, Canada / India, 2005
Three stars

This is an often beautiful, sometimes elliptical but mostly somewhat-conventional film about the unsettling ways in which widows – including children – were treated in India, at least in the 1930s (the ending title card leaves it ambiguous as to how much of these practices continue today). Probably the strangest aspect of it was how the film started by focusing on the young child, then switched over to a love story bit that seemed always Disney-esque, and the film shifts focus once again even after that. Although it’s not as if these elements are unrelated, the film isn’t really set up as a multiple-perspective affair, which makes it all somewhat jarring. Overall I liked it, but I was not really blow away either, and I imagine that had the subject matter been slighter and more familiar, I would have been harder on it.

Source: Fox 35mm print
21 May, 7 PM