Water and Women Talking explore how the individualization of faith threatens patriarchal norms 

By: Rochelle Raveendran

This article contains discussions of sexual assault, rape and organized religion.

Faith is the supreme, paradoxical act of human imagination. On the fated intersections of gender, location, era and experience, faith saves from despair and leads to despair. Water (2005), directed by Deepa Mehta, and Women Talking (2022), directed by Sarah Polley, both explore how these diverging paths are not mutually exclusive.

Organized religion is represented as a vessel for violent social control in both films, reliant on conformity and fear of the unknown. Female characters reconcile their traumatic reality with their beliefs as they attempt to take back their lives — not away from God, but from a patriarchy that anoints itself with God’s authority. In Women Talking, theological conversations help the characters reach an understanding of the collective good, whereas religion must be contradicted by conscience in Water in pursuit of what is right. Neither film denounces religion, yet they demonstrate how faith in oneself enriches morality both within and beyond the constraints of organized faith systems.

Based on a novel by Miriam Towes, Women Talking follows women in a Mennonite colony who have discovered that the men have been drugging them with horse tranquillizers and assaulting them in their sleep. Two girls spot a rapist running away in the night, proving these terrorizing attacks were not the work of demons, as the men claimed. With several of the men arrested and the rest away in town to post bail, the women have two days to decide on their course of action: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave before the men return. Much of the intergenerational conversation takes place in a barn, with narration by Autje (Kate Hallett), the youngest child present.

Polley’s script creates nuanced, lively characters, carefully incorporating dynamics between them to emphasize the pain and strength of their community. The actors tackle blocks and barbs of dialogue with equal naturalism, making the heightened reality of the extended conversation accessible.

Occasional moments of humour — bursts of laughter to prevent tears — add to the conversational realism as the women grapple with the implications of their decision on their future and that of the next generation. The characters express their trauma in realistic shades, from the serene Ona (Rooney Mara) to the gently witty Greta (Sheila McCarthy) and righteously furious Salome (Claire Foy), who wields a scythe in one of the opening scenes to attack the man who raped her four-year-old daughter.

Religion is the framework for their discussion. Fighting may be at odds with the women’s vows of pacifism, but staying would also be a violation if it may eventually lead to violence. Leaving has its own implications, requiring them to lie, which could also deprive them of salvation. Salome responds to this theory with an exceptional monologue that sucks the air out of the barn, challenging God to kill her if she has sinned by protecting her child.

As they discuss their shared and individual traumas, the women quote Bible passages and sing hymns to soothe one another. “They made us disbelieve ourselves,” says Mejal (Michelle McLeod), who has been experiencing panic attacks and began smoking after her assaults. But the men cannot take their religion from them. Avenues of thought are posited, considered and countered, often sharply, as practical questions bring out philosophical discussions. While Salome says she will become a murderer if she stays, Ona, who is heavily pregnant from rape, says that with time and distance, she could imagine forgiving the men. She suggests that, to some level, the men and boys are victims themselves of a reprehensible mentality perpetuated in the colony. This is not mentioned to exonerate the men, but is part of a larger discussion about what will happen to the women’s sons, depending on their decision.

In a film built on dialogue, Polley deploys her silences with much intention, from horrific flashes to longer sequences that confront the aftermath of abuse. “The silence was the horror,” Autje narrates, a deeply unsettling concept reflected in Water’s ambiguous conclusion.

While both films are fictional, Women Talking is based on a horrific string of sexual assaults in a Bolivian Mennonite colony. Water similarly imagines a fictional reality based on real experiences. Set in India in 1938, the film opens with the death of an eight-year-old child bride’s husband. After becoming a widow, Chuiya is sent by her father to live out the rest of her days in a decrepit, impoverished ashram in Varanasi for Hindu widows, in accordance with custom. To avoid becoming economic and emotional burdens to their families, widows are ostracised in these secluded shelters as bad omens, to the point that accidentally touching one is cause for a bath. 

Played by the bubbly Sarala Kariyawasam, Chuiya is our way into a suffocatingly oppressive world, where women live sequestered from the rest of society with shaved heads and shrouded in white cloths. While Autje’s narration retells events, Chuiya is on the ground and has no qualms about questioning oppressive rules as she encounters them. A toothless, senile woman dreams of the deep-fried sweets from her wedding feast that widows are no longer allowed to eat, repeating the list like a prayer — plump white rasgullas, piping hot gulab jamun, yellow ladoos made of pure butter.

Regardless of rules, Chuyia steals a ladoo and sneaks it into the ashram for her. As the widow cradles the sweet in her hand, we see a startlingly affecting flashback of her wedding ceremony. She, too, was a child when she married, adorned in a red and gold sari and being fed a ladoo as she sat alongside her adult husband. The rich colours of the widow’s memory stand out from the cool tones that dominate the film, adding lush surrealism to her treasured promises of the past. 

Polley also plays with surrealism to depict an external world of opportunity when a census taker arrives at the colony, blasting Daydream Believer by The Monkees from his car. The song is a disorienting shock amidst Hildur Guðnadóttir’s moving, classical score, but a needed reminder about the sheltered existence these women live. The stakes of their ultimate decision are raised a notch higher by the total unfamiliarity they would expose themselves to by leaving. While Women Talking depicts a surreally unknown future, Water washes the past with dreamy nostalgia.

There is little sense of community within Water’s ashram, largely due to its fierce leader, Madhumati (Manorami). She forces the beautiful and miserable young widow Kalyani (Lisa Ray) into prostituion, ferrying her across the sacred Ganges river every night to upper-class clients. Kalyani dares to hope for escape after falling in love with Narayan (John Abraham), a rich, idealistic university student and admirer of Gandhi who soon proposes marriage. Though Chuiya and Kalyani befriend each other, Chuiya’s relationship with Shakuntala (Seema Biswas) is the thematic crux of the film.

A middle-aged widow, Shakuntala, is plagued with bitter doubts about a doctrine she follows but cannot truly believe. She urges Chuiya to forget her past life but cannot bring herself to total resignation about her own fate, even questioning a pandit – a Hindu scholar – on what exactly Hindu scriptures say about the treatment of widows. Biswas subtly flits between anger and pain, transforming the briefest of pauses into moments of suffocating contemplation. Her performance is delicate and dignified as Shakuntala pushes herself to the point of trusting her conscience over the dictates of her religion without the support of anyone around her. Women talk in Water, but real dialogue is sparse. Still, Shakuntala emerges with rich interiority because we do not need words to see her self-empowerment; under Mehta’s direction, her inner conflict and resolution play clearly over her face.

“The details of this new world may be withheld from us, but Polley makes it clear the women’s hopes have been realized.”

Life and death coexist in the Ganges. Bathing in the river cleanses Hindus of their sins, and cremated ashes are submerged in its waters to free the deceased from the cycle of rebirth. Kalyani embodies this continuum when she drowns herself in the Ganges, after learning her fiancé Narayan’s father is one of her clients. Her dream of transcending the confines of religion has been proven futile, yet she cannot bring herself to return to Madhumati. Chuiya takes Kalyani’s place on the ferry, trafficked across the Ganges to upper-class clients, upon Madhumati’s direction. Shakuntala is too late to save the child, who returns in an almost catatonic state. Chuiya’s silence for the rest of the film is made more sickening by her irrepressible vivacity as she railed against the ashram’s confines.

In a shared cinematic universe, what would Ona say about Madhumati? With time and distance, could Madhumati be understood as a victim in her own right, as Ona suggests about the colony’s men? The perpetrators remain almost entirely offscreen in Women Talking, but Madhumati is an overpowering, abrasive force with only love to spare for her pet parrot.

Water wisely recognizes how women can be complicit in their own oppression; Madhumati claims every penny the widows make goes towards paying the rent, though she saves enough to purchase cannabis for herself. Prostituting Kalyani is necessary for survival, she says, “and how we survive here, no one can question, not even God!” This line is delivered with pure villainy, a missed opportunity for even a hint of genuine panic at what losing income from Kalyani could mean for the ashram. As there is no Ona equivalent in Water to suggest how Madhumati is a consequence of a society that pushes widows to its fringes and leaves them to fend for themselves, she is too one-note to be received with even the slightest nuance.

Though we do not see the effect of time on Chuyia, Shakuntala blesses her with distance in Water’s final scenes. She cradles the child as they listen to a fictional Mahatma Gandhi speak at a Varanasi train station. He looms over the film, with characters mentioning his progressive opinions on the lower castes and widows, but this is his first appearance. After Gandhi’s poignant speech ends, he and his followers board the train, including Narayan, now disillusioned with his family and grieving his fianceé. In a spur-of-the-moment decision, Shakuntala scrambles through the crowd and lifts Chuyia onto the train, into Narayan’s arms. Chuyia is as unaware of what is happening as she was when she first arrived at the ashram, but Shakuntala is stoic in the righteousness of her decision after the train pulls away. Gandhi may symbolize hope, but Chuyia becomes the fragile, progressive future. Mehta wisely eschews a broadly optimistic ending, leaving Shakuntala’s fate ambiguous, and avoiding any mass awakening of the widows to their persecution. Despite government intervention, mistreatment of widows persists in India today, making this conclusion a prescient commentary on how progressive change cannot be spurred overnight, or in this case, after 84 years.

Women Talking will only be released in cinemas this December, so I will not spoil its ending here. Compared to Shakuntala’s spontaneity in Water, however, the women exhaust all possibilities before reaching their decision, which is still not universally accepted within the colony.

We only see the briefest glimpse of the women’s future, which is actually the present day. Autje’s past-tense narration, combined with the desaturated colour grading, turns the film into a historic artefact. Though the art direction feels oddly artificial, similar to a history documentary re-enactment, Women Talking is presented with the understanding that the women who we are watching on the verge of creating a new world have already created one. The details of this new world may be withheld from us, but Polley makes it clear the women’s hopes have been realized.

“For a long time, I believed that God is Truth,” Gandhi says in the closing scenes of Water. “But today I know that Truth is God.” Rather than looking to an unknowable supreme being and working backwards, he encourages individuals to search for God in the world. It is the call to action that leads Shakuntala to culminate all her doubts. After finding truth in their theology beyond what they’ve been told, the characters in Women Talking take their own climactic action. Trusting your own eyes is more than simply a pithy message; in societies that rely on women doing the opposite, it is fundamental for survival. The future is ambiguous and hope may not be guaranteed, but religion is proven malleable in Water and Women Talking, for worse and for better.