Mehta's Water is Watery At Best

"An exquisite drama brimming with life and laughter and great tenderness and wrenching tragedy."

"A profoundly moving drama".

The reviewers and critics seem to be in alignment over the last movie in Deepa Mehta's Elemental trilogy. Happy to see the movie and support Canadian film, I walked away feeling quite moved by the piece. Moved to puke, that is.

Frankly, I'm shocked that I had seen nary a negative review of Water before I had seen it. I suppose I can concede that it does an alright job at being what it's trying to be, but what it's trying to be is more akin to sour milk than Water. To start, the concept itself is absolutely loaded with potential. Water deals with serious issues such as British colonialism in India and how widows there take on less-than-human societal status; destined to live in widow houses, to beg, or even turn to prostitution in order to survive. To take heavy stuff like this and to throw it into a plot which is, frankly, ridiculous, is an insult to the message and issues it raises.

The plot is very constructed, and the coincidences are so
numerous it's laughable. The plot and events themselves just aren't plausible, like the 8 year old protagonist, playing and having a jolly good ol' religious time just days after both her parents ditched her to the strangers in the widow house since she's officially now a husbandless and worthless girl.

Another thing that disturbed me in the movie is that there's a romance in it between this one widow, and this one educated progressive Indian. Ok, I know that fair skin is considered very attractive by Indian standards, but the loving man and woman look so Western World that I couldn't tell if they were even supposed to be Indian. That Mehta, a Canadian Indian woman, would a propagate the warped myth that western looks are better than East Indian ones seems a touch unenlightened. Also, since they were the only two stereotypically good-looking characters, it wasn't rocket science to guess who was going to coincidentally end up bumping into
who.

But the thing that annoyed me more than anything else in this movie
was the Hammer Me Over The Head melodramatic soundtrack. Brutal. The soaring strings! That fucking lonely flute! Could you dumb it down
just a little more please, Mehta? Geez. I started having flashbacks to the soundtrack from Braveheart. But if you liked that movie, then you can probably handle water. It's like Mehta is talking down to her audience for the whole movie. But given Water's numerous rave reviews from critics and audiences alike, Mehta sadly may have made just the right movie for just the right audience. And cheers to that.