Deborah Lipp

Fire (1996) 8/10
Sita (Nandita Das), a young Indian bride, comes to live with her husband, his brother and sister-in-law, and their mother. Soon the sisters-in-law find themselves drawn to each other.

I don’t know if writer/director Deepa Mehta, an Indian expatriate, knows country music at all, but when watching Fire I was repeatedly reminded of the song Angel From Montgomery:

If dreams were lightning
Thunder was desire
This old house would have burned down
A long time ago

The family in Fire lives in a house that would surely burn down.

Netflix has Fire categorized as “Gay and Lesbian,” and certainly it is the story of an affair between two women. But everyone in Fire is dealing with desire, repressed and expressed, and its consequences.

It is silence that rules the roost, as personified by the matriarch of the house, the elderly mother of the two husbands, who has been rendered mute by a stroke. Biji rings a bells, nods or shakes her head, but cannot speak, bearing silent witness to all that goes on in her home. And a lot is going on! Radha’s husband Ashok appears to be saintly, but his obsession with serving his guru extracts a price from his marriage. Sita’s husband Jatin has not given up the girlfriend he had before consenting to an arranged marriage. He barely looks at his frustrated bride. And the servant, Mundu, seethes with sexual frustration, and doesn’t mind expressing it in front of Biji, since she can’t complain.

Some movie fans wonder if Sita and Radha (Shabana Azmi) are lesbians, or are bisexuals, or are driven to each other simply out of loneliness. That may be beside the point, and beyond the scope of the film. Sita tells Radha that their language has no words for their love; the women are in a process of discovering their love and their identity, and are not really at the point yet of categorizing it.

More important is the constriction that runs their lives, and their efforts to free themselves of it. At one point Ashok tells Radha that his mother is ringing her bell. About to answer the call, as she always does, Radha looks at her husband and says “Why don’t you go?” “Of course!” he says, and goes to his mother. It had occurred to neither, before, that Radha was other than the servant, the one who responded, the one who fulfilled needs without expressing her own; but Sita and their affair has changed all that.

I don’t think that Fire is a brilliant movie. It introduces its family too quickly; it is rather hard to determine that Ashok and Jatin are brothers, for instance. Nandita Das is a mediocre actress, although Shabana Azmi makes up for it with a luminous performance. But the story is so powerful, with its silences so expressive, that I found myself captivated, regardless. There are still too few Indian movies that have naturalism and immediacy on their side, and the way that Fire slaps the face of tradition, both in India and in Indian film, is striking (no pun intended).