Vow of silence

An Indian woman contends with her violent husband in Deepa Mehta's new film

Last Updated: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 | 10:46 AM ET

By Katrina Onstad, CBC News

Deepa Mehta, director of the film Heaven on Earth, which premieres at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. (Tina Fineberg/Associated Press)

Heaven on Earth opens in India, where a giddy young bride is embarking on an arranged marriage abroad. Her family sends her off in a gale of colour and reverie, dancing and singing. But when she arrives at the Toronto airport, all colour seems to leach from the film, appearing again several scenes later when blood drips down her split apple-cheek, caused by her husband’s hand.

Canadian director Deepa Mehta, who came to Canada at age 23 from Amritsar, India, has made a career of confrontation via camera. She parses the most hidden corners of cultures, with a particular interest in scrutinizing her home country. In the 1996 film Fire, Mehta depicted a lesbian affair between two Hindu women, causing some radical homophobes to vandalize movie theatres. Four years later, protesters re-emerged as Mehta prepared to make another of her “elements” films, Water. (The other one, Earth, came out in 1998). It wasn’t until 2003 that Mehta could make Water. Shot, finally, in Sri Lanka, it detailed the lives of socially ostracized Indian widows. Water went on to earn a nomination for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards.

While promoting that movie in Edmonton, Mehta had a chance encounter that led her toward Heaven on Earth. Some people in the Indian community staged an event in her honour. That night, Mehta met an Indo-Canadian woman with a young daughter who had performed a Bollywood dance for the group.

“I said, ‘What do you do? What does your husband do?’ Which is the polite thing to ask in the community. And she said, ‘I’m divorced,’ which is very unusual. I said, ‘How come?’ And she said, ‘Well, he used to beat the hell out of me,’” Mehta recalls. “I was shocked by her frankness.”

Chand (Preity Zinta) suffers mental and physical anguish at the hand of her husband, Rocky (Vansh Bhardwaj, left), in Heaven on Earth. (Dusty Mancinelli/Mongrel Media)

Impressed by the aid she received from the Edmonton police force, Mehta says the woman left her arranged marriage and became a policewoman.

The story clicked with a few other pieces that had been forming a whole in Mehta’s imagination: the New Zealand film Once Were Warriors (about abuse in a Maori family) and Irish novelist Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Mehta had also interviewed the children of abuse survivors for a short documentary called Let’s Talk About It.

“If I’d say to people, ‘I’m very intrigued by domestic violence, and maybe there’s a movie to be made,’ they’d say, ‘Oh God, don’t even go there,’” Mehta says, wrapped in a turquoise scarf in the living room of her Toronto home, her darkly outlined eyes unblinking. “Nobody wants to talk about it, even after all these years. But it’s fascinating, because it’s not prevalent in [just] one culture. There is no colour, no caste, no status that doesn’t have domestic violence, and yet there’s this universal stigma. That intrigued me.”

In Heaven on Earth, the bride, Chand (played by Bollywood star Preity Zinta), moves in with her husband’s family to a cramped house in a grey, snowy Toronto suburb. Their circumscribed universe seems totally disconnected from the environs; this is a Canadian movie in which almost no English is spoken. The sensation of being cut off from the world at large is part of Chand’s terror. She works in a factory, but her husband takes her paycheque. She is not permitted to call home. Very soon, emotional anguish is matched by brutal physical beatings.

“Chand’s isolation is total, which is the beginning of abuse. He took her freedom way, and then her dignity. After that’s gone, there’s nothing,” Mehta says.

But Mehta was cautious about turning Heaven on Earth into a public service announcement, adding a kind of lyric melancholy to temper the social message. Chand is given a magic potion by a Jamaican coworker that’s supposed to make her husband fall in love with her. The potion is linked to an Indian folk tale about a snake, and the beast comes to life. This strain of magic realism gradually moves to the forefront of the film.

“I thought if the whole thing were to become a kitchen sink drama, I wouldn’t like to see it myself,” Mehta says. “In Hollywood films on the subject, [the abused woman becomes] vigilante, like Jennifer Lopez learning to box at her husband [in Enough]. There’s an idea that women have to just get out. But what if the isolation is so strong? What if you can’t [leave]?” The folk tale, Mehta says, is one way that Chand copes: “Her imagination is her survival.”

Deepa Mehta, left, on the set of Heaven on Earth with Preity Zinta. (Dusty Mancinelli/Mongrel Media)

Asked whether she thinks Heaven on Earth will bring her controversy yet again, Mehta scoffs at first. “Not at all. A lot of films have been done in Hindi cinema about abuse.” Then, suddenly, she backtracks, fiddling with her scarf.

“Actually, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Sometimes I worry. But I feel now more than ever that India is considered a force to be reckoned with, so that gives everyone self-confidence, and with self-confidence comes an ability to look at the underbelly of the community, which might not be that savoury. Maybe people will want to help, instead of saying, ‘Oh my God.’”

Heaven on Earth opens in Toronto on Oct. 24, Vancouver and Montreal on Oct. 31 and in other Canadian cities on Nov. 14.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.