Review of Water (1985) by Kuhan T — 08 Mar 2010
A powerful exploration of the experience of Indian widows marginalized by a rabidly materialistic patriarchy, the inheritance and propagation of corruption among some of the women themselves, and the possibility of faith in the face of institutionalized absurdity.
The entire film is bookended by a statement of the laws which keep these women in abject poverty and the acknowledgment that, after over sixty years, things haven't necessarily changed for many of them, problematizing the symbols of hope offered up by the film, especially Gandhi and the generation of young progressives he inspired embodied in Narayan.
A scholar who introduced the film characterized one of Mehta's central concerns as women's erotic autonomy, and at the close of this trilogy, her heroines have yet to experience more than the most fleeting of freedoms before paying the social, political, and deeply personal price for their 'transgressions'.
While it is full of familiar questions about gender, age, social organization and political power, there is something to be said for those questions to which we continually return and from which we continually come away empty-handed.
This review of Water (1985) was written by Kuhan T on 08 Mar 2010.
Water has generally received positive reviews.
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