SHAUN DE WAAL – Jul 31 2009 06:00
Here comes another spoiler warning: if you want to be surprised by what happens in Heaven on Earth, you’ll have to postpone reading this review until after you’ve seen it. The gods forbid (or perhaps that’s heaven forbid) that I suggest you don’t read it at all.
I was certainly surprised by the new film from Indian-Canadian writer-director Deepa Mehta, who is well known for a series of very impactful movies, in particular her “elements trilogy”, composed of Fire, Earth and Water.
These films tackle issues that are seen as taboo in Indian society at large: Fire dealt with lesbian love and Water with the dire situation of widows subjected to ancient traditions.
Earth was probably the least controversial of Mehta’s trilogy in that it dealt merely with the partition of India and Pakistan — and the bloodshed that followed. It seems easier to acknowledge that historic trauma than it is to talk about lesbians or widows.
Perhaps while waiting for inspiration that would provide her with a film titled Air and thus make a quartet of the trilogy, Mehta has somewhat changed tack. Not that Heaven on Earth lacks punch, so to speak, dealing as it does with domestic violence. The English title, by the way, is either highly ironic or a complete misnomer, unless “heaven” simply refers to the supernatural realm. (There have also been a large number of films with that title since the first, in German, in 1927.) The title for release in India, Videsh, certainly sounds better.
I have no idea what it means, despite all the help on offer from the babelfishes of the internet. I can’t even determine if it’s a Hindi word or a Punjabi one, but I did learn a little about what language is spoken where in India, so that’s something. The closest I can come to an explanation is that on a site for Indian baby names it says Videsh means “Foreign”. Perhaps not a terribly good name for your baby boy, unless he really was a bolt from the blue or you were impregnated by an itinerant angel, but it’s okay, I suppose, for a movie.
Mehta’s story is partly inspired by a play called Naga Mandala by Girish Karnad (even I know “naga” or “naag” means “snake”), which in turn is based on an old folktale about a lonely wife comforted by a magical snake. The film starts with a prologue in which bride Chand (Preity Zinta) relates the tale as told by her mother, and that moment might well lead one to believe that this is a social-realist movie in the mode of Mehta’s other films, with some reference to Indian folklore as a sort of thickening textural agent. But it’s much more than that. Here, Mehta takes more chances than she might if the form were straightforward realism — or she takes the chances she must if she is to escape always being the social realist.
Chand is sent from a small town in the Punjab to Canada, where she is the female partner (if that’s not too neutral a word) in an arranged marriage. The celebratory occasion, with singing and dancing, before she leaves India soon gives way to misery in Canada. Her husband Rocky (Vansh Bhardwaj) is cold and abusive; her mother-in-law (Balinder Johal) is possessive of her son to a scary degree. The rest of the extended family, all squashed into a small house in a suburb of Ontario, are a varied bunch, each with a nuance to add to the package as a whole. The central drama, however, is the painful triangle of bride, groom and mother-in-law. Well, it becomes a rectangle of a kind — with the introduction of a cobra.
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