Here comes another spoiler warning: if you want to be surprised by what happens in Heaven on Earth, you’ll have to postpone reading this review until after you’ve seen it. The gods forbid (or perhaps that’s heaven forbid) that I suggest you don’t read it at all.
I was certainly surprised by the new film from Indian-Canadian writer-director Deepa Mehta, who is well known for a series of very impactful movies, in particular her “elements trilogy”, composed of Fire, Earth and Water.
These films tackle issues that are seen as taboo in Indian society at large: Fire dealt with lesbian love and Water with the dire situation of widows subjected to ancient traditions.
Earth was probably the least controversial of Mehta’s trilogy in that it dealt merely with the partition of India and Pakistan — and the bloodshed that followed. It seems easier to acknowledge that historic trauma than it is to talk about lesbians or widows.
Perhaps while waiting for inspiration that would provide her with a film titled Air and thus make a quartet of the trilogy, Mehta has somewhat changed tack. Not that Heaven on Earth lacks punch, so to speak, dealing as it does with domestic violence. The English title, by the way, is either highly ironic or a complete misnomer, unless “heaven” simply refers to the supernatural realm. (There have also been a large number of films with that title since the first, in German, in 1927.) The title for release in India, Videsh, certainly sounds better.
I have no idea what it means, despite all the help on offer from the babelfishes of the internet. I can’t even determine if it’s a Hindi word or a Punjabi one, but I did learn a little about what language is spoken where in India, so that’s something. The closest I can come to an explanation is that on a site for Indian baby names it says Videsh means “Foreign”. Perhaps not a terribly good name for your baby boy, unless he really was a bolt from the blue or you were impregnated by an itinerant angel, but it’s okay, I suppose, for a movie.
Mehta’s story is partly inspired by a play called Naga Mandala by Girish Karnad (even I know “naga” or “naag” means “snake”), which in turn is based on an old folktale about a lonely wife comforted by a magical snake. The film starts with a prologue in which bride Chand (Preity Zinta) relates the tale as told by her mother, and that moment might well lead one to believe that this is a social-realist movie in the mode of Mehta’s other films, with some reference to Indian folklore as a sort of thickening textural agent. But it’s much more than that. Here, Mehta takes more chances than she might if the form were straightforward realism — or she takes the chances she must if she is to escape always being the social realist.
Chand is sent from a small town in the Punjab to Canada, where she is the female partner (if that’s not too neutral a word) in an arranged marriage. The celebratory occasion, with singing and dancing, before she leaves India soon gives way to misery in Canada. Her husband Rocky (Vansh Bhardwaj) is cold and abusive; her mother-in-law (Balinder Johal) is possessive of her son to a scary degree. The rest of the extended family, all squashed into a small house in a suburb of Ontario, are a varied bunch, each with a nuance to add to the package as a whole. The central drama, however, is the painful triangle of bride, groom and mother-in-law. Well, it becomes a rectangle of a kind — with the introduction of a cobra.
I’m trying not to give too much away, but the main complaint against the film seems to be that it doesn’t work: specifically when it warps into “magic realism” about an hour into its running time. What has hitherto been an uncomfortable view of the life of Indian emigrants in Canada, often hard to watch but with a strong sense of authenticity, and an admirable complexity, suddenly takes on an entirely different tone and makes entirely different demands of the viewer.
What, precisely, are we to believe? If it began to look like the usual account of tradition versus modernity, Heaven on Earth comprehensively shatters that view. It may be traditional for women to be oppressed and almost casually maltreated, but it’s even more traditional (it’s pre-cinema) for stories to be developed and resolved in a fairy-tale manner. It would be possible to see Chand’s experience as delusional, up to a point — the point at which the rest of the family becomes involved. Then we’re asked to find magic amid the dreary realities of life, and to take it seriously.
I didn’t find this as hard as some fellow viewers did. In fact, I found it rather exhilarating when the film made its leap into the world of the supernatural. If anything, I thought it should have pushed the supernatural angle harder. Weirdly, and surely deliberately, the magical is presented almost as plainly as the realism: it’s as though Mehta decided not to hype it up or give it the bells and whistles of highly coloured fantasy, but to integrate it with the ordinary.
That, too, worked for me, in general; saying it could have been pushed harder means it needed the same kind of investment in detail and feeling that the rest is given. Maybe that’s tricky to do, given the different assumptions underpinning the two modes, but that’s the risk Mehta takes, and I think it was a risk worth taking.
Many found Heaven on Earth plain tedious, and some thought it absurd. In my fruitless search for the meaning of Videsh, I found Nikhat Kazmi of The Times of India condemning it outright: “Mehta, the modernist, suddenly seems to have turned quack doctor, offering grandma remedies for chronic ailments —” I suppose that criticism is fair enough. An hour into Heaven on Earth, Mehta seems to go squishy, to lose her toughness. In the context of domestic violence, not to mention joblessness and social alienation, folkloric conjurations can look like a bizarre escape into wish-fulfilling fantasy.
But, whatever you think of the magic element in Heaven on Earth, it’s undeniable that it has powerful central performances. Zinta, hitherto a star of the Bollywood cinema, here gives a totally real and very touching portrayal of a woman against whom the odds have been overwhelmingly stacked. Bhardwaj, in his first movie part, is convincing in both sides of a schizophrenic role. (The snake is pretty convincing, too.) Johal, as the mother-in-law, is simply terrifying.
I think Heaven on Earth is a brave film, and I found it engrossing. If it puzzled me and left me wondering what worked and what didn’t, and whether I could make sense of it overall, that is no bad thing.
We are often so caught up in our own fantasies of redemption (whether provided by movies or not) that we confuse them with reality, and a film that troubles that boundary is worth seeing. Anyway, better troubling than boring. Go and let yourself be troubled.