The third installment of Deepa Mehta's 'elemental' series, Water is a subtle attempt to highlight an age-old social evil in india. The problem is, its quite boring, unless you have a compulsive obsession with the technical aspects of film-making, in which case, a lot of things would make more sense to you than they did to me. From my perspective, the cast did tremendous justice to their roles, teleporting me to the pre-independence days of ignorance and superstition (not that they're no longer in vogue!). The statistics at the end of the movie speak about the sad state of widows in this country, some of them widowed at ages of 8, 9 years.
If you look at water as a movie which just tells you, "Listen, it is true that plight of widows in india used to be bad. If you don't believe me, let me show you", it does a decent job. you feel for the poor child who's widowed before even coming of age, you feel for the inmates of the widow home who lead a wretched life of neglect. You are also shocked by some revelations about society that was.
Where it goes wrong is where John abraham comes onto the scene and a convenient love ensues between him and lisa ray, a widow as above. I feel, it needed more script space than in actually got. Where also it goes wrong is in the ocassional fleeting references to Gandhi and friendly debates on british rule. they were probably in place to give the viewer a feel of the times..hmm, fine then. but when you look at the statistics in the end, you can't help but feel that, the director is trying hard to justify her efforts.
Simply put, Water is yet another love story gone wrong.
concept 7/10 (not really relevant to the times)
performance 9/10
screenplay 7/10
technical 7/10
Overall 7.5/10
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