Director Deepa Mehta’s latest film, Water, so completely enfolds the viewer into the tragic lives of widows in 1938 India that I assumed there wasn’t a dry eye in the theatre. But after the lights came up at the South Asian Literary and Theatre Arts Festival screening and Mehta had begun with the Q & A, I was surprised to hear an audience member accuse the film of being “anti-Indian”. No stranger to controversy, the Indian-born filmmaker from British Columbia kept her composure and responded that she understood the man’s concern and that his points were best suited for a one-on-one discussion she would be happy to have after the public event.

I was struck by the anger the viewer had expressed and was left wondering, did I somehow miss the group hug?

The film concludes with the statistic that nearly 34 million Indian widows still live in ashrams, atoning in deplorable conditions for the sins that prematurely killed their husbands. From a western perspective, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could possibly defend such a practice, regardless of Indian civic traditions. But what I realized later is that the texts of Manu, as the audience member was rightly trying to argue, do not spell out that this is how widows should live. Rather, as the film argues and as is often the case, it is the application and interpretation of the law that creates a very real expression of a seemingly universal truth — women are not valued the same as men.

Exquisitely rendered time and again throughout the film, this visceral truth erupts in sadness, anger and bewilderment as the characters simply go about their lives. Mehta’s direction plays out slowly and deliberately — explicating without melodrama and transcending while remaining rooted inside the day to day. Though this is an Eastern film with an Eastern context the storytelling is so powerful that the women become universal. I was compelled to examine how women are valued in my own Western context and I wasn’t encouraged.

Because the privileges of Western women stand in such stark contrast to the lack of freedom and expression in parts of the East, it is easy to think that the valuation of women varies widely by culture. However, take a quick spin through a week of primetime television in the United States and count how many women vs. men end up as the objects of a brutal rape and murder, or are treated as a prop to sell a product during a commercial. Though the context varies widely, universally it would seem that women are objects to be done with as a patriarchal society sees fit.

I’m not breaking any new ground here in regards to feminist thought and I’m certainly not building an argument defensible by statistics or experts. I wouldn’t even go so far as to couch my opinion as “conventional wisdom”, though I can’t imagine anyone could argue that women have traditionally enjoyed the same privileges as men. What I am saying is that Water as a film goes deep and stays there, forcing you to face the reality of these women’s lives and feel it.

So often if we cry at films we cry because of the tragic turns the plot will take; destroying the lives of the characters and uplifting them at a whim — either way, they are like leaves in a cinematic wind. But in Mehta’s Water the plot feels purposefully transparent and predictable — it is the characters that make the story, appearing as real as if the film were a documenatry. And when one woman simply expresses the hope that a deceased character be reborn as a man, it is the intimacy of that moment that achieves far more than any plot twist could.