March 30 , 1998

The Toronto-based director touches a chord with her exploration of relationships.

By Namrata Joshi

When filmmakers are at work, their familiar word "action" has the ring of an army command, setting the lights aglow, the camera whirring, silencing the busybodies and drawing the players into the magical penumbra of suspended disbelief. The tone of authority is important, for it brings film close to the individuality of art, like poetry and painting or even music. The director is the ultimate auteur of the film because he or she can mould the film unit like clay.

Deepa Mehta is a woman for whom the little standing area behind the camera is akin to the skipper's perch. In the shadows of Sikandar Lodi's tomb in the capital's sprawling Lodi Garden, where she is shooting her forthcoming film, Earth, her word is law. Fortifying herself with cups of coffee and a chain of cigarettes, the Toronto-based Indian director looks closely into the monitor as the camera rolls and Aamir Khan says his lines. She catches the minutest of flaws in the expression, notices something amiss in the costume, and shouts "cut" in a cold metallic tone of finality. As the lights go out, the star is seen scratching his head quite sheepishly, wondering if he failed to give a perfect shot.

It is this perfection that defines Mehta's craft. Every detail in her film is carefully put on paper. "She pays attention to every shot, frame, even the colour scheme," says Jaaved Jaaferi, who has worked with her in her two earlier films, Sam and Me and Fire. The penchant for details shows in her scripts. "Reading a Deepa Mehta script is like watching the movie itself," says Rahul Khanna, son of filmstar Vinod Khanna who makes his debut with Earth. Yet, despite the iron-clad script and the director's military-command approach, the making of a Mehta film is not an army drill. She loves her actors. At the end of an honest re-try, her exuberant "excellent" gets an answering smile from Khan. An okay take from Nandita Das, the actress made famous as the vivacious sister-in-law of Shabana Azmi in Fire, makes Mehta jump to her feet. "Gorgeous," she cries.

For Azmi, a long-standing friend, this is Mehta's most endearing quality as a filmmaker. "She is not patronising, doesn't treat us like china doll but extracts the best with a lot of patience and a non-aggressive manner," she says. Azmi should know the value of non-patronising direction. She had a taste of working under a bossy director when the late Satyajit Ray called her to the set to act in Shatranj Ke Khiladi without showing her the script. Mehta's shooting too is a closed affair, but there is a lot of interaction between her and the cast members. This helps her identify the Indian idiom for the central theme of her films -- human relationships.

This theme was given a new twist in her most talked-about film, Fire, where Azmi and Das played sisters-in-law seeking emotional fulfilment in each other when their marriages go sour. Though still awaiting release in India, it generated heat in the film festival circuit for what was seen as its lesbian theme (Mehta insists the focus is less on sexuality and more on individual choices). Sam and Me, her first feature film, was about a young Indian immigrant in Canada. A fresh and honest film, it was, as Mehta says, "a lot about my own insecurities". Camilla, her first Hollywood movie, is woven around the relations between an old musician, played by the late Jessica Tandy, and her younger colleague Bridget Fonda. Though the film won Tandy an Oscar nomination, the film was a disappointment at the box-office in the US. Worse still, the theme of human relationship that runs like a thread through Mehta's films was lost in an industry where the distributor is king.

Mehta has among her friends a movie mogul like George Lucas (Star Wars) who had commissioned her to do two episodes in a television series on Indiana Jones' encounters with great men -- one in Greece and the other in India. In the Indian episode, Indiana Jones encounters J. Krishnamurthy, the philosopher. Mehta is every inch a global filmmaker in both commercial and film-festival circuits. Sam and Me got a special mention at Cannes in 1991 which, in turn, helped her bag the US $10 million (Rs 39 crore) Camilla project from Miramax, the producers of such aesthetic and box-office hits as The Crying Game, The English Patient and Piano. And now Hollywood star Richard Gere wants her to direct Beyond the Seas, which is about the relationship between a naval lieutenant and an oceanographer.

Earth is based on Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man. The film looks at Partition through the eyes of a seven-year-old Parsi girl. Khan plays the ice candy man while Khanna is a masseur, both vying for Das, the beautiful servant in the Parsi household. The menage a trois is, in the little girl's world, a lyrical interlude in a phantasmagoria of violence. After Fire and Earth, Mehta will complete her trilogy with Water, a story of sexuality and religion set by the river in Varanasi.

The 45-year-old Toronto divorcee's (she was married to Canadian TV producer Paul Saltzmann) decade-long journey into films has a marked autobiographical oneness, despite the variety of subjects she has handled. The alienation of the Delhi girl -- Mehta majored in philosophy from Lady Shri Ram College -- in the West is embodied in Sam and Me. The break-up of her marriage led to the quest in her films for love and its frontiers. And it is her search for roots that brings her back to India repeatedly, either to the parks and colonies of Delhi or to the river banks in Varanasi. But most films, like the best in every other art, are after all autobiographies of the mind. Mehta undertakes these voyages into her life while writing her scripts at the kitchen table in her Toronto home in the company of daughter Devyani. The distinguishing feature of her introspection through the camera is that she wants to "touch a chord".

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