The White Screen on Water

The White Screen of a movie theater fascinates me; how the plain canvas is transformed to a magic weaved by people going out of their ordinary. White Screen is an attempt to capture the transformation that the plain canvas undergoes and the effect it has on me as a member of the audience.

Water (2006)

Director: Deepa Mehta (India)
Cast : Seema Biswas, John Abraham, Lisa Ray, Sarala, Raghuvir Yadav

My backdrop to Water was another rather inane movie, Ganges - The Stairway to Heaven. The Ganges movie was a typical product of a Westerner's fascination with the Mystical East, especially India. Something a movie like Mystic India only seeks to propogate the best-selling tourist product.
One is already made conscious of the controversy that surrounded the filming of the movie. The director, though granted permission to shoot, soon found that government guarantees alone donot stop mobs. With the production sets destroyed and thrown into the river, she left India, angry. It took her 4 years to come back and finish what she started. And that she has grown through this experience shows in her movie and her responses.
Water starts quite softly, nothing more than a Chuiya enjoying sugar cane in the late '30s. Circumstances find the 8 year old at a widow's ashram, where she soon finds that age is no barrier to society's scorn of a widow. An old matron "keeps the culture intact", so to speak. And the stoic worker in Shakuntala finds herself continuously at conflict between her faith and her conscience. Chuiya, in all her childish innocence, is quite oblivious to the condition of widows, as she asks her dad : "hum kab thak vidhva rahenge?"(till when do I remain a widow?) and introduces herself as a widow to Narayan, a wide-eyed romanticist, whose imagination has been fired by Gandhi's Satyagraha.
The daily life at the ashram has its contradictions galore, what with one of the younger widows, Kalyani, allowed to "keep her hair". This contradictory exception is made for she plays the role of the bread winner for the ashram, taken across the river every night by a eunuch. It is an unspoken, unquestioned phenomenon, she gets her space in the attic, and everyone around embrace the silence. Such an embrace comes out strikingly in the movie: the silence embraced by the other widows to Kalyani's plight, the silence embraced by the society at large to the Mahatma's call for widow remarriage and upliftment of Harijans, the silence of Narayan's mother to her husband's infidelity, and the silence that Shakuntala embraces to keep her strength. These contradictions, when portrayed through alternating frames of faith and hypocrisy, makes the audience question the silence that we embrace through our own daily lives.
The director has made wonderful use of the music score, helping the audience leap through the varying moods and subtleties in her narration. The romanticist is fully indulged, with the monsoons and moonlight, tears and claps of joy, all ingredients of a Bollywood movie added to the recipe. That these formulaic sequences are part of the movie still doesn't take away the focus from the uniqueness of the movie.
The understated performances of Seema Biswas, John Abraham and Lisa Ray make a strong impression. Even in the revolutionary times of the Indian Independence movement, the bravery displayed is not overdone (a-la Rang De Basanti) nor does it become moralistic.
The white screen however, is being built up for the finale. The romantic interest between Kalyani and Narayan takes an ironic twist, the sojourn over the Water affecting the victim more than the perpetrator. The Water of the Ganga almost seems to follow its Karmic duty, in a sense only understood by Her and the widows in the Ashram.
Deepa Mehta however doesn't let you embrace that silence, instead throwing you out of the poignant moment with an indignation that only human avarice can generate. She does not allow you to silently question and walk out of the theater, nodding your head. Instead, she makes you feel the enormity of what Gandhi accomplished, by simply refusing to embrace the silence. The Water in Ganga, and your time watching the movie, donot flow in vain. One also walks away strengthened with Hope, as Shakuntala shows how faith and conscience play out. White Screen opines that this will go on to be one of Seema Biswas' most powerful performances.

A definite to-be-watched movie of this year.

Post Script: The interaction with the director, Deepa Mehta, had its pointed moments. A largely white audience wanted to focus on the destruction of the sets in Varanasi, the "Hindu" controversy, and questions Water would raise in India. A very smart Deepa Mehta turned it into the debates to be raised in the West and "to look at our own backyards as it is the most visible and accessible to us". Touché


White Screen's overall rating: 8.5/10.

Narayan's character could have been worked on better. Some sequences seemed unreal, the usual trap that period films fall into. Like Kalyani riding a car with Narayan, having literally had just a night's stand. Like Chuiya's innocence suddenly diving into precocity with no reason.
However, repeat, a definite to-be-watched movie of this year.

For Name's sake

This blog has been in conception for 2 years! And why, dear Reader, you ask.
Don't have enough to say? Nah. Between eating, sleeping, working and other worldly matters, everyone has enough to say! No, writer's block wasn't it, laziness, maybe just a bit.
It was for sake of a name. Anytime I tried to open a new account on blogger, either the username or the blog title or the webname gave me a message : "this is already in use"..Now what is it with online portals that can't take two things to have the same name? With 6 billion people alone on this planet, surely, there are more than 2 things (persons included) with the same name.
And so, here I was, being denied this joy, all for the sake of a Name.
And coming up with a name is not so easy--forget about your name or of those around you, you grew up with those names..try to think of changing the name of something already named, and you'll know what I'm talking about. Finally, I hit upon a plan, a combinatorial exercise. And you see the results.
The blog reflects a part of the Universe, a speck, me and my environs. A speck that each one of us is and experiences; sometimes are so full of experiencing and living it, that it ceases to be a speck anymore. Just for us.
But, reality continues to exist, and I and my experiences remain nothing but a speck. This phenomenon that each of us gets lost in is so Universal. Such is this Universal Speck of a blog.

So, dear Reader, what I think, feel and express cannot escape such a limitation, nor can I expect a blog to help me escape that.
For thought precedes expression. And Times of Thought sometimes defy expression, sometimes are expressed here.

And one of the greatest of thinkers expressed it so beautifully:

-Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one