Fire - When love catches fire

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Movie
German title Fire - When love catches fire
Original title Fire
Country of production Canada
original language Hindi
English
Publishing year 1996
length 104 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Deepa Mehta
script Deepa Mehta
production Bobby Bedi ,
Deepa Mehta
music AR Rahman
camera Giles Nuttgens
cut Barry Farrell
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
Earth

Fire is a 1996 Canadian film directed by Deepa Mehta .

action

The film is set in the Delhi of what is now India . Sita lives with her husband's family, Jatin. Jatin's brother Ashok, his wife Radha, Sita's old mother-in-law Biji and the domestic servant Mundu also live in the house. The family runs a food stall and a video shop and belongs to the lower middle class in Delhi.

But traditional family life is broken through. Sita is frustrated and bored with her marriage, which was arranged by her parents. Jatin is also dissatisfied with the marriage, because he has loved another woman for a long time, but she does not want to marry him. Therefore, Jatin neglects Sita and cheats. Ashok is also dissatisfied with his marriage because Radha cannot have children. Ashok decides to live an ascetic life and not have sex with Radha anymore.

The entire life of the family is subject to the strict traditions of Indian caste and family life. This is in contradiction to the cultural influences of Western society with its claim to individuality , which disrupt traditional life in India, especially in the cities. While there is a relative way out for the two husbands, breaking out of this situation would mean social exclusion and social decline, especially for women. Nevertheless, Sita and Radha, who both feel marginalized from the family, come closer against all moral conventions and fall in love. Within the family, they secretly become a couple.

But at some point the two men discover that their wives are lovers. In the sense of the Hindu epic of Sita and Rama , Radha goes through fire to prove her purity. She survives and both women leave the family to live their own lives in an uncertain future.

Remarks

Fire is the first in Mehta's three-part film series about modern India. Earth followed in 1998 as the second part and in 2005 the third film Water .

Fire was temporarily banned in India after fundamentalist Hindus attacked cinemas showing the film.

Reviews

For the most part, the film received positive reviews. Dirk Jasper writes in his film lexicon of “beguilingly beautiful pictures full of poetry and smoldering longings” and in film-dienst 17/1997 it says:

Sensitive melodrama with tragicomic elements, which tells with beguiling images of the conflict of Indian women between tradition and modernity, a sense of duty and self-assertion and finds an ingenious metaphor in the reinterpretation of the mythological ordeal.

Nevertheless, negative impressions are inevitable. Thus, the television magazine TV Movie "is not always effective," feels in its issue 17/1997 the action as and Ernst Corinth is in all praise for the film believe that Mehta back for them using a decrepit cliché when neglected by their husbands wives lesbian would . In one review, the Indian feminist Madhu Kiswar rejected the film as a "naive outpouring of a self-hating Indian woman".

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