Deepa Mehta's _Fire_

[Michael Rabe]

>From: jkirk at micron.net
>To: <mrabe at artic.edu>
>Subject: Re: Deepa Mehta's _Fire_
>Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 16:32:03 -0700
>
>Mike,
>
>I would like also to say something on the list (which list? I leave it up to
>you) about the movie FIRE. It was not a "lesbian movie" per se; it was not a
>"romantic" movie per se; it was an interesting attempt by the director to
>explore the realities of extended family social and sexual interactions.
>>From what I've learned over some forty years of fieldwork, she left out A
>LOT.
>
>Politicised lesbians get annoyed with it because, as the interview between
>Mehta and a lesbian partisan indicated, for ex., they think the film
>proposes that a lesbian relationship is only due to default of the male.
>This position seems to assume that people must be "born" lesbian.  Any other
>genesis in their view would smack of fraud.
>However, Freud was right when he claimed that people are basically bisexual.
>How they express sexuality is the result of  social conditioning and life
>experience.
>
>Mehta eloquently defended her view of the film (in that interview) as being
>about stifled emotion.......stifled either by the dictates of tradition
>(fast for your husband's life;or, if you cannot have kids then sex is a
>sin), or by the inconveniences of modernity (as in Sita's husband's easy
>access to porn, cafe singers, etc etc.).  Anyone who has spent a lot of time
>on the subcontinent, especially among groups which enforce strict
>proprieties on women, knows the incredible force of stifled emotions of all
>kinds in the everyday lives of both women and men.
>
>The naive rejection by some of the public responses to this film (leaving
>aside Hindu nationalist reponses) is either disingenuous or occasioned by
>the fact that viewers in question don't know much if anything about South
>Asian social structures and living situations.  In this aspect of reception,
>the film doesn't "translate" too well, though no fault of the director.
>That's life. How many people were able to understand the now classic
>Japanese films when they first hit our shores?
>
>On nit-picking about the names of her principals: I found her name choices
>just fine.
>The film is a study in the ironies of everyday life in this social class.
>Thus, Sita in the film is rejected by HER husband too, but in an ironic
>twist:  because of his infidelity, not hers!  Radha, like her classical
>namesake, is continually separated in longing from her (not lover-) husband,
>as also from her forever never-to-be-born son. (Lord Krishna, Radha's
>consort, meanwhile, is often worshipped by devotees as husband, lover and
>son.)   The irony of Radha's situation in the film is instantly accessible
>from her name.
>
>The final irony, which posits a possible resolution of the impossible
>predicaments of the two women, is that they begin to love one another.  I
>think Mehta was courageous to try this out as a  filmic, literary,
>psychologically realistic denouement. Otherwise, as so many of us both
>Indian and foreign know, in ordinary life such extended family dilemmas as
>presented in the film never get resolved, or resolutions are attempted by
>means more desperate than the one chosen by Mehta's heroines. Sometimes
>women go mad, or commit suicide by jumping down wells, or are set fire to by
>their young ambitious husbands. A rare one like Phulan Devi, commits serial
>murder.
>
>Joanna Kirkpatrick
>
>