Water is the third and final film in Deepa Mehta's "Elements" series that began with my beloved Fire and continued with the breathtaking Earth. In my opinion, Water is the weakest of the trilogy, but it is still lovely and moving.
Set in the holy city of Banaras in the 1930s, Water portrays the experiences of a child bride Chuyia (Sarala). Widowed before she is even old enough to know she is married, Chuyia is exiled to an ashram ruled by a tyrannical old hypocrite Madhumati (Manorama). Chuyia is looked after by two of the other widows in the ashram, the contemplative Shakuntala (Seema Biswas) and the lovely dreamer Kalyani (Lisa Ray), as well as a dashing Gandhist scholar (John Abraham) who meets Kalyani and Chuyia on one of their rare excursions outside the ashram.
The film’s real message is wrought in the juncture between the ashram's secluded cloister and a greater city in which the progressive ideas of Gandhi are beginning to take hold. The greatest strength of this film is Deepa Mehta’s visuals, which call on the titular element of water as a rich metaphor for so many things: a force for change and destruction and cleansing, but also, when stagnant, a haven for the breeding of disease.
As usual, Deepa Mehta extracts intense, cerebral performances from her actors, although Lisa Ray and John Abraham are not quite up to the standard set by the excellent work of Seema Biswas and especially little Sarala, who perfectly conveys the sadness and confusion of her story from the perspective of a little girl.