Water

Foreign-language film offers insight into Hindu widow houses | Mindy Belz

Water, Deepa Metha's luminous film about cloistered widows in 1938 India, debuted to critical acclaim at the Toronto Film Festival last year, but it has opened in only 91 U.S. theaters. Yet in two months Water grossed $2.3 million, keeping it among the top-30 movie moneymakers.

The film (rated PG-13 with English subtitles) opens with a river voyage for 8-year-old Chuyia (Sarala), whose much older husband has just died. Unaware that her life is about to change, Chuyia munches raw sugar cane on her way to an ashram for widows where, in adherence to Hindu texts, she will remain an outcast the rest of her life.

Shaved and shunned, the precocious, round-faced beauty learns soon enough that, in spite of her pluck, her life is over. And the ashram is no benign confinement. To buy subsistence food for the widows and support her own drug habit, a huge bully of a widow named Madhumati—or "Fatty," as Chuyia calls her—contracts with a Brahmin pimp (and hermaphrodite) to sell the loveliest widows into prostitution.