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Water

What astonished Lisa Ray at the Toronto film festival
03rd Nov 2005 16.48 IST
By Agencies

After the screening of Deepa Mehta's Water at the Toronto film festival recently, there was something that astonished Lisa Ray .

And the astonishing reaction was the fact that Toronto's film and corporate elite stood up to cheer the film after the premiere.

Toronto-born Lisa, was astonished with the reaction because ‘Water’ is such a challenging story.

Not only is it a tragedy about the impoverished residents of a widows home in the late 1930s in India, it plays in Canada in Hindi with English subtitles.

"I mean," Lisa tells the Sun as ‘Water’ is prepared for a Friday theatrical release in Toronto, Mehta now makes home, "people don't want to work so hard anymore and sometimes I don't want to work so hard when I go see a movie.

"But," Lisa says, "despite being so culturally specific, it is so universal. The empathy for these characters is incredible, because of the humanism."

That is what drew Lisa, the Canadian daughter of a Bengali Indian father and a Polish mother, to the project.

"It has been my dream to be part of that kind of cinema."

Lisa's co-star and on-screen lover, Persian-Indian John Abraham , shared her career dream but with his own variations.

"Having Deepa on my resume as an actor is a very prestigious name to have," he tells the Sun. "So that was initially, and honestly, why I accepted the script. Then, when I read the script, I was pretty impressed."

John also knew, of course, about the film's troubled history. Five years ago, Hindu fundamentalists stormed the film's location, burned sets, threw them into the Ganges River and threatened violence against Mehta if she did not return to Canada. The film was delayed. It was supposed to be the completion of a trilogy that started with Fire (1996) and continued with Earth (1998).

The disruption embittered Mehta, although she finally recast the film and shot it over the past year, in secret, in Sri Lanka.

"Coming down to brass tacks," says John, "in terms of commercial viability, it had a controversy behind it, so getting it noticed wouldn't be a problem."

Since shooting for ‘Water’, John has rocketed to fame post Dhoom . But he still wants an international audience to know his very different appeal in a serious film such as ‘Water’, which raises a difficult socio-political topic in a very frank way.

John says that some Indian people want to bury the issue of the plight of widows and the history of the abuse, especially of child brides who are widowed as young as seven. Others, like John before he made this film, are not even aware of the history of widows houses, some of which still exist in deplorable conditions.

At a time of great political upheaval in then British-held India, John’s character is an upper class liberal who falls in love with a destitute widow living in one home. What he doesn't know is that she supports her entire ashram by working as a prostitute.

Meanwhile, the arrival of a tempestuous child widow upsets the workings of the place.

For her role, Lisa worked with Mehta on a provocative image. She is the lotus flower blooming in dirty water, a symbol of purity surviving the worst conditions.

"In the script, as is written, she's beautiful and sensual, but unselfconscious and unaware of it and vulnerable and blah, blah, blah," Lisa says.

"These are all words. But you can't 'act' that, I think. It becomes an intellectual exercise.

"Deepa, and that is part of her brilliance, she knows exactly how to get what she wants from her actors, exactly how to trigger you. So she gave me this visual of the lotus flowers that was my driving image in this character.

"And it can be extrapolated largely to the entire film (to other characters and political issues). Because, what people are empathizing with is the trueness. And trueness is purity. It is very unblemished in this film. It is uncorrupted.”

"I'm so kicked," Lisa continues.

"We somehow thought that no one would get it. That's why I'm so happy."

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