New Indian Film Catches 'Fire'

Hot on the heels of Mira Nair's scintillating Kama Sutra (at the Kendall last spring) comes Deepa Mehta's newest film Fire opening today at the Coolidge Corner theater in Brookline.

Unlike Nair's sexy ancient love story, however, Mehta (director and writer) weaves a much more accessible plot in the modern, if less romantic, setting of a present-day middle class family in New Delhi.

Fire stars Nandita Das as Sita, the wide-eyed but feisty new wife of Jatin (Jaaved Jaaferi), who, goaded into the marriage by his older brother Ashok (Kulbushan Kharbanda), continues to see his Chinese girlfriend by night. Sita becomes depressed and grows increasingly closer to Radha (played by Shabana Azmi, one of India's most accomplished actresses), Ashok's wife, who has taken a vow of celibacy with her husband to justify her inability to have children. Denied the passion they need by the males in their lives, the two wives begin an affair that threatens to tear the family apart-and undoubtedly raise great controversy in Mehta's homeland.

"It's not often that a director hears Madam, I am going to shoot you' after her film's premiere," recalled Mehta of Fire's opening in Trivandrum last spring. The Indian-Canadian director knew she was breaking taboos but had no idea how resistant her viewers would be. "In India, there is no word for the type of love Sita and Radha share," she explains, and the existence of homosexuality is mostly denied by conservatives. What bothers men most about the film, Mehta says, is not the homoerotic tendencies it unveils, but the empowerment it gives wives over their husbands-a shift in the traditional power structure that is viewed as extremely threatening to their way of life.

With fascinating, evocative imagery, Mehta makes this a film about much more than lesbianism or even Indian patriarchy. It is perhaps the first contemporary film to attempt to describe the everyday life of India's growing middle class (which currently numbers more than 200 million) rather than Indian poverty or pompadour. The family owns a video store/restaurant and lives like 90% of the city-dwelling small business owners in India. Issues of tradition versus westernization and individuality, skillfully presented, are played out between the brothers and their wives: one haunted by tradition, one desperate to escape it.

Following the inevitable discovery of the affair, the film closes with an ending as refreshing and thought-provoking as the conclusion of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, as the audience is left to decide whether the women have indeed achieved the liberation they long for. Lusciously photographed and passionately told, with some of the year's most romantic Hindi music, Fire ignites the senses as well as the emotions.