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Water
EMAILPRINTFox Searchlight Pictures
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 25 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 19 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Foreign | Musical | Mystery | Romance
Written by: Deepa Mehta
Directed by: Deepa Mehta
Release Date:
Theatrical: April 28, 2006
DVD: August 29, 2006
Running Time: 117 minutes, Color
Origin: Canada / India
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Lisa Ray, Seema Biswas, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Waheeda Rehman, Raghuvir Yadav, Vinay Pathak, Rishma Malik, and John Abraham
Set in 1938 Colonial India, against Mahatma Gandhi's rise to power, Water begins when 8-year-old Chuyia is widowed and sent to a home where Hindu widows must live in penitence. (Fox Searchlight)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Bollywood/Hollywood Earth Fire
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Village Voice Bill Gallo
This work of gorgeous fury, about the virtual imprisonment of millions of Hindu widows in the years before independence, transforms Mehta's feminist rage into an eloquent testament to the hunger for freedom.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
A film with the epic scale and fearless common-sense vision of Water is a revelation.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Profound, passionate and overflowing with incomparable beauty, Water, like the prior two films in director Deepa Mehta's "Elements" trilogy, celebrates the lives of women who resist marginalization by Indian society.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Exquisite storytelling, acting and visuals.
Read Full Review >Variety Eddie Cockrell
Deftly balancing epic sociopolitical scope with intimate human emotions, all polished to a high technical gloss, Deepa Mehta's Water is a profoundly moving drama.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis
An exquisite film about the institutionalized oppression of an entire class of women and the way patriarchal imperatives inform religious belief.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Water, set in 1930s India, is something pretty rare in the world of movies: an artistic muckraker. It is superb and strange at once, a discreet and self-disciplined attack dog of a movie.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The writer-director doesn't raise her voice, even as she firmly condemns the injustice. Water seduces us with its beauty and sorrow.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly David Chute
Hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Mehta and her cameraman Giles Nuttgens capture the area's rich interplay of light and color, land and water, and riches and poverty.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
In an elemental way, though, the film always works. The acting can be basic, a cross between Bollywood directness and Western nuance, but it has weight.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Lurking just beneath Water's serene, storybook surface is an unmissable, defiant passion.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The stunning Lisa Ray, a Bollywood exile, makes one of the most beautiful widows ever to grace the screen. Vidula Javalgekar gives a memorable turn as the infirm "Auntie." But the real find is Sarala, a Sri Lankan girl who memorized dialogue in a language she does not understand and delivers it with conviction.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
Mehta has created the perfect guide to this strange female world.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
As a sign of how stubborn some irrational religious traditions can be, Hindu protesters forced Mehta to close down her Indian location and finish the film in neighboring Sri Lanka.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
A haunting and disturbing film, set in 1938, about "widow houses." Though occasionally overwrought, it emerges as life-affirming.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The best elements of Water involve the young girl and the experiences seen through her eyes. I would have been content if the entire film had been her story.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Louise Kennedy
Succeeds in its central goal: to turn a forgotten class of women into real, memorable human beings who deserve a different life.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
A potent feminist protest--all the more so because some of the laws depicted are still in force today.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Gandhi did save India from the British, but he didn't save India from the Indians, and the horrific subjugation of widows continues there even today. It was only 10 years ago that Mehta encountered the Hindu widow who inspired her film.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
A powerful drama, albeit a flawed one with a clumsy, didactic script.
The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson
Water is gorgeously composed and beautifully shot, with a dogged emphasis on water imagery and symbolism, and a luscious sense for color. It's often profoundly beautiful. But its distanced, calculated attempts to draw sympathy, from its wide-eyed child protagonist to its sad-eyed, personality-free lovers to its fairy-tale ending, all blunt the meaning behind that beauty.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.7 (out of 10) based on 19 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Ri K. gave it a5:
Attempts at creating an emotionally manipulative film were transparent. With a story that should have put a knot in my throat, I was left with only a sense of disgust with how the film was (unfittingly) made to look "beautiful". It's a very sad state of affairs when a formulaic quasi art film like this is the kind that gets P&A dollars to somehow break through, while there are so many genius American indies that we never get to see on the big screen, not to mention all the great foreign films that don't have to resort to cheesy love stories and "stylish" trick cinematography. It's even sadder that this film has received such a high meta score - is what is screened in American theaters these days so bad that "Water" is really so refreshing??? I believe this film is a crime to cinema. A ridiculous waste of gobs of money (production and marketing) only to ruin a truly interesting subject matter & potentially amazing story.
Prudence K. gave it a10:
Easily the funniest and saddest films of the year! I don't know. Sometimes I didn't know what was going on, I am fluent in Hindi though... so that was cool! I thought it was good when they cut her hair, it was so sad! I cried at that part. Oh! And I loved when they played with the dog, that was so cute! But it was mean when they cut her hair. But that lady was so mean! She was big! And she was obsessed with that bird! It was so weird! Cool film!
Barbara K. gave it a2:
Tragedy as a perfume commercial.
Miss Anonymous gave it an8:
I thought the movie was beautiful. It's ashame that it was banned in India. My relatives over there do not get to see it yet even though they are upper-middle class educated Indians I see all the time the ancient prejudice against women still existing - not to the extent of the story but it's still there.
Jim G. gave it a6:
This is the first movie where the depth of emotion conveyed left me thinking there were at least four lead characters. So many characters, so well developed. Though I know people want to make this a one-issue movie, I found it effective in simply telling the story of the individual characters, showing us the truths of their lives even if we don't know all the events that preceded or anything that follows.
Mike T. gave it a4:
I agree with Rahul -- very well stated! -- and with Tasha Robinson of the Onion. The movie was overly gorgeous, looking more like a TV commercial than a believable film story. And the surface beauty actually detracted from the important anti-religion message.
Rahul K. gave it a5:
A somewhat perplexing and maddening movie that doesn't really deliver on the promises suggested by the advertising. Yes, the scenery and settings are evocative, and create a strong image of a time and place, but the plot is meandering and plodding, and drags much more than necessary. Compounding this problem-- or perhaps causing it-- the characters are not easy to relate to. They are like one-dimensional cookie-cutter fillers that fail to pull you into the plot enough to send a clear and powerful message, which is unfortunate because this is primarily a political story of social inequality; and while it gets the point across about the treatment of widows in India, it really struggles at making the point stick because the characters are the kind that dissolve from memory moments after the film ends. Furthermore, the use of a white woman as the female lead and an Anglicized Indian guy as the male lead seems dishonest in the context of the film, a naked attempt to market the film to a Western audience that left a bad taste in my mouth. Another facet of the film that is irksome is the film's poster, which brags about how "religious extremists" tried to obstruct production of the movie and kill the director. This creates the illusion that this movie is going to be revelatory or shocking or a monumental historical event, but this is not really the case. The claims may be true, but they are not accurate indicators of the content of the movie; you could easily watch through the whole film and not think twice about anything you saw, much less consider it a matter of serious controversy (unless you are already familiar with the moral codes of fundamentalist Hindus). Of all the scenes, the final is by far the most emotionally demanding, but it seems tacked-on and manipulative rather than poignant and meaningful. "Water" is a cinematic curiosity, certainly, if only for the insight into another time and place, but in most other aspects, it is a forgettable movie packaged in "exotic-foreign-movie" marketing and nice scenery. 2/5
