Fire (Deepa Mehta)

 

Picture: C-     Sound: C     Extras: B-     Film: C+

 

 

Deepa Mehta is a director who cannot take the silence anymore in India.  A country with the biggest number of films produced annually does not have much room for alternate voices and with Fire (1996), she dares to challenge the Bollywood formula of musicals, adventure, and tantalizing formula entertainment.  Dealing with the real India of lonely women, unspoken lesbianism, a system that hates women by trying to keep them in their subservient place, and an underlying potential of Fascism and radicalism in the country, the film was met with an organized boycott the likes of which were never seen in India before.  It brought their real-life Fascists and extremists out of their closets.

 

The film did manage to get by the India censorship board twice with no cuts, but found itself banned in some places.  It is a simple, smart, inoffensive film that covers territory we have seen in other cinemas already.  Both women (Shabana Azmi of John Schlesinger’s Madame Sousatzka (1988) and Nandita Das) are part of two very different marriage situations that are failed and soulless.  Though intimacy between them is not necessarily a predictable result, Mehta uses the opportunity to profoundly express the isolation and mistreatment of women in the country in general.  This is well acted and directed, but only its India setting makes it so bold.  The more you understand that, the more powerful the film gets, but requiring that information limits the film for most people.

 

The letterboxed 1.85 X 1 image suffers by not being anamorphic, or having a newer transfer.  It recycles a PAL transfer that has a strange look and frame-rate mixing.  This hurts the presentation of what is a good-looking film.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo surround is from the analog Ultra Stereo surround sound source.  Ultra Stereo was a poorer version of Dolby A-type surround that low-budget productions used to save money and avoid being in mono sound, but it has more distortion problems than old Dolby at its worse.  This is one of the few films of any note to ever get issued in the format.

 

Trailers for this and the follow-up film Earth (1999) are included, as well as text notes by Mehta about the film, extensive cast and filmmaker biography/filmography sections, more from Mehta in the Controversy: Uproar! Section, plus a nearly 18 minute piece called Firestorm! that exposes the new rise of extremism in supposedly passive India.  It shows how simple honesty can shake things up and makes Mehta an important director to watch out for.  We continue with Earth, her next film, also on DVD elsewhere on this site.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo