Spotlight on Deepa Mehta

SOMETHING OLD: Camilla

SOMETHING NEW: Water

SOMETHING BORROWED: Earth

SOMETHING BLUE: Fire

Water, the third part of Deepa Mehta’s “Elements” trilogy, premiered at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival after years of disappoint- ment and delay, and is finally being released in the USA this spring.

Mehta first achieved interna- tional promi- nence with the release of Fire in 1996. Newlyweds Jatin and Sita are both from proper middle-class fam- ilies. They’re expected to find satisfaction in their arranged marriage, but nei- ther of them can.

Ignored by her husband, the bride slowly devel- ops a passionate interest in her sister-in-law Radha. Jatin’s brother Ashok is a religious man and Sita assumes that Radha is equally devout, but as the two women get to know each other, Sita realizes that Radha’s spirit has been stifled by Ashok’s ritualistic self-abnegation.

The release of Fire sent shock-waves throughout India where a lesbian relationship between two characters named after Hindu goddesses was per- ceived as a deliberate affront by fundamentalists. But Mehta’s elegant storytelling skills and the powerfully restrained performances of her two lead actresses (Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das) were widely acclaimed in the West, where Fire received numerous film festival awards.

Two years later, Mehta released Earth, based on Bapsi Sidhwa’s autobiographical novel Cracking India. Unlike Fire which is set in the vague present, Earth is set at a specific point in historical time: the moment right before British rule ended in 1947, prompting India and Pakistan declared themselves to be separate coun- tries.

Earth’s main character is Lenny Sethna (Maia Sethna), the daughter of a prominent Parsee fam- ily living in the cosmopolitan city of Lahore. Lenny has been born into a very comfortable life; Hindus, Moslems, and Sikhs all dine together as friends at her parents’ gracious table. But soon political disagreements intrude on her world, and Lenny watches in confusion as the adult relation- ships around her begin to fragment. Atrocities on all sides lead to escalating violence and inevitable tragedy

Mehta is careful to show the unfolding horror through Lenny’s innocent eyes, and told from a child’s perspective the story of this one specific ethnic conflict achieves heart-breaking universal- ity.

  With Water, Mehta once again tells a deeply per- sonal story set in a moment of great historical change. This time the year is 1938, and Gandhi is just beginning to mobilize the crowds that will inevitably drive the British out of India a decade later. But eight year old Chuyia (Sarala) knows nothing about any of this; she is a child beset by her own mis- eries. Married to a man she barely knew, Chuyia is already a widow. According to custom, her father and her mother-in-law bring her to an ashram in Benares (the holy city on the Ganges River), where she is expected to renounce the world and spend the rest of her life in mourning.

For the other women in the ashram, Chuyia is an immediately destabilizing force. As they look at her, they see the children they once were, and they also see the children they’ll never have. Shakuntala (Seema Biswas), who has devoted herself to religious rituals for years, begins to ache with long-buried maternal longings.

The three chapters of the trilogy, which Mehta both wrote and directed, share common elements. Like Radha in Fire, Shakuntala is deeply dis- turbed by watching a vibrant youngster rapidly aging under the weight of tradition. Like Lenny in Earth, Chuyia becomes the unwitting facilita- tor of a doomed romance. But the mood of each film is set by a distinct palette keyed to its title: the glowing the reds and oranges of passion in Fire, the dusty browns and grays of civil war inEarth, and the bleached white of religious ascet- icism in Water. When the widows celebrate the spring festival of Holi by throwing powdered dye on Chuyia’s sari, the burst of color is almost painful.

Mehta has also directed several films in English. While none of them has quite the depth of her “Trilogy” films, Camilla from 1994 should be savored for Jessica Tandy’s luminous perform- ance as an elderly widow who finds a way to reconnect with an old lover (played by Tandy’s husband and frequent collaborator Hume Cronyn). The squeaky plot which positions them for their reunion is almost worth it; this was Tandy’s last leading role, and Tandy and Cronyn are perfect in their final scenes together.

Deepa Mehta has created unforgettable women in the course of her distinguished career. Her main characters (Camilla, Lenny, Radha, and Shakuntala) all start out obedient, but their reser- voirs of inner strength inspire us.

Jan Lisa Huttner is the Managing Editor of FILMS FOR TWO: The Online Guide for Busy Couples. A complete archive of Jan’s reviews for the Woman’s NewspapersTM can be found in the “Treasures” sec- tion of www.films42.com. Her con- versation with Deepa Mehta is in the “Chats” section.