Water Reviews
Top Critic
Quite possibly the best picture of the year thus far, with no fewer than three of the most luminous female performances I have ever seen onscreen.
Mehta prevailed, and this scandalous, beautiful and very moving tale of repression, hope and a tragedy is her triumph, and Hindu India's shame.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Unfolds with the clean, simple lines of a fairy tale, and if the characters initially seem to be too black-or-white to be believable, the moral complexity of the story reveals itself in a gradual, subtle manner.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Ebbs and flows with devastating truths and profound insights into the hypocrisy of extremism in any religion.
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| Original Score: B
Mehta's film is courageous and reticent, a shout masquerading as a whisper.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Reminds us that Mehta is a filmmaker of courage -- she refused to abandon this film even after fundamentalist protestors shut down the production in India -- and singular style, telling stories that have never been told on screen.
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| Original Score: 3/4
You'll leave the theater with a lot to think about, especially regarding the plight of women around the globe.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The final chapter in Mehta's feminist trilogy (Fire, Earth), is, alas, the weakest.
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| Original Score: C
Below its surface, Water isn't about religion, politics or even India. It's about timeless and universal divides between people, when humanity is eclipsed by self-serving subjugation.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It levels its criticisms within a climate of respect, a combination that creates a work of true humanity.
| Original Score: B+
The film is lovely in the way Satyajit Ray's films are lovely. It sees poverty and deprivation as a condition of life, not an exception to it, and finds beauty in the souls of its characters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Succeeds in its central goal: to turn a forgotten class of women into real, memorable human beings who deserve a different life.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It is superb and strange at once, a discreet and self-disciplined attack dog of a movie.
Profound, passionate and overflowing with incomparable beauty.
| Original Score: 4/4
Water runs deep because Mehta is an able -- if somewhat gloomy -- storyteller.
| Original Score: 3/4
Like India's greatest filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, Mehta is a great pure-hearted storyteller and a maker of shining naturalistic images.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Pretty amazing stuff. Pretty incredible movie.
... an important movie that captures the beginning of modern India in scenes of Gandhi preaching his message of freedom.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Taken as a whole, Water presents a damning view of this aspect of fundamental Hinduism.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Lyrical imagery is matched with subtle performances.
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| Original Score: 3/4
... Deepa Mehta's controversial new epic is driven by a scorching urgency whose intensity exceeds even the previous two installments of Mehta's Elements trilogy of Indian romances.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Although Water is easily Ms. Mehta's richest and most complex film, it is still the work of a humanitarian, made with incredible tenderness and real concern for the plight of her female characters.
... a gorgeously shot, melancholy drama about a 7-year-old girl sent to live in a 'widows' house' in 1938 India.
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| Original Score: 3/4
... the incessant references to Gandhi keep gumming up the class-war love story.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Mehta has inspired her cast to rise from one dramatic challenge to another, and her film is charged throughout with the tension between the wisdom of accepting one's lot in life and the urge to resist it.
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| Original Score: 4/5
... Water is an exquisite film about the institutionalized oppression of an entire class of women and the way patriarchal imperatives inform religious belief.
| Original Score: 4/5
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.
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.
Mehta has concocted a potent mix of politics, historical conflict, religion and philosophical questioning.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Both the plot and its symbolism are transparently basic, yet Mehta handles them with a quiet, lyrical assurance.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Like Bandit Queen and Maya, Water bravely delves into outmoded social traditions of India, thus roiling the waters of religious fundamentalism, which might mean that Deepa Mehta's film will never get past the censors in that country.
