Taking the Plunge

Below the surface: A young child plumbs the depths in Tamás Wormser's documentary Touched by Water. Courtesy Artesian Films.

It was a soak in the tub that inspired Montreal filmmaker Tamás Wormser to make Touched by Water (Eaux de vie), a documentary odyssey about bathing rituals that premieres at this year’s Montreal World Film Festival.

“It was one of those eureka moments: it hit me just how much I missed public bathing, and how foreign that concept is here,” says Wormser, who immigrated to Canada 20 years ago from Budapest, a city with 123 hot springs. Born in a country where bathhouses have been part of the urban fabric for centuries, Wormser was shocked when he came to the land of the chlorinated public pool. “I kept asking people where they went to bathe. ‘In the bathroom,’ was the most common reply,” he recalls.

For the 42-year-old Wormser, public bathing is a communal rite. “In Hungary, we went twice a week to the bath. It was such a natural thing. We went as a family, and we went with school.”

Shot in 13 countries over the course of 10 years, the exquisite Touched by Wateris both an ode to the social ritual of public bathing and a thought-provoking look at water’s spiritual significance. From Christian baptism to Muslim prayer ablutions, most key ceremonial rites of passage involve water. “I wanted to make a film to try to understand humanity’s relationship with water, to get at the essence of what bathing meant in different cultures,” Wormser says.

The film is narrated by Quebec actor Jean Marchand, while the original music by Ganesh Anandan and Dino Giancola provides an aural backdrop to Wormser’s lush images. We see bodies sponged down with soft foam in steamy Turkish hamams and underwater shots of Hungarians dancing at a spa rave party in Budapest. Wormser joined the ruddy-faced men of the Finnish sauna association, who, after sweating together, whip themselves with birch branches and dive into the frigid Baltic Sea.

Montreal filmmaker Tamás Wormser. Photo Rob Schwartz.

The director of Steps: A Triumphant Journey of a Dancer and The Ring (no, not that one) and the founder of Artesian Films, Wormser is a gifted cinematographer. His footage immerses the viewer in a kaleidoscope of exotic water rituals. Because he had little money to make the film — he was refused assistance by the usual government funding agencies — Wormser shot it solo with a cheap video camera. Given the private nature of bathing rituals, this approach worked in his favour. “If I had had a five-person crew, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. This way, I was just one guy with a tiny camera.”

Despite Wormser’s unobtrusive methods, gaining access to some of the rituals was challenging. The women in the Turkish hamam were tourists — not Muslims — and thus were filmed by Wormser’s wife. It also took many years to get inside a mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath. The mikvah was a key component of the film, says Wormser, because it is the source of most Judeo-Christian water rituals. According to Jewish law, constructing a mikvah even takes precedence over building a synagogue. Today, Orthodox Jewish women use mikvahs to purify themselves after menstruating so they can resume sexual relations with their husbands. “The rabbis I spoke to agreed that a mikvah had to be in a documentary about bathing. But it’s a sacred tradition that’s not supposed to be filmed,” says Wormser.

Some of the most extraordinary images in Touched by Water come from the Ganga Sagar pilgrimage at the confluence of the Ganges River and the Bay of Bengal. Every January 14, an estimated half million people in India cleanse themselves in the Ganges, one of the world’s most polluted yet most sacred rivers. “As I was filming, this woman came out of the water and said to me, ‘Do you understand this? This is the mother, can you feel this?’” recalls Wormser. “She had so much conviction. People come to the Ganges to die, so they can be burned there and their ashes put into the river. It made me realize how ancient our connection to water is. In every religion, water is the purifying element. It is both a womb and a tomb.”

It’s not the first time Wormser has chosen a subject that illustrates our common bond as humans. His 1996 film Faces of the Hand looked at the uses of the hand across different cultures. “The idea is to take something simple and meditate on it until something emerges,” says Wormser. At a time when our popular discourse is dominated by talk of a clash of civilizations, Touched by Water is a call for open-mindedness. By documenting the unique features of bathing rituals around the world, Wormser underscores our universal relationship to water.

“On the one hand, I feel enriched by humanity’s diversity. Yet while we are different, we are also the same. I do believe we are all one and that water is one of the connections we have.”

The French version of Touched by Water (Eaux de vie) screens at the Montreal World Film Festival on Aug. 29.

Patricia Bailey is a writer and broadcaster based in Montreal.

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