Questions of an Indian widow, 8 years old

At dawn, Chuyia rafts across the Ganges River for her wedding. It is an arranged marriage in 1938 India, and the saucer-eyed girl is for the first time meeting her intended, a feeble man decades her senior. Soon, her husband dies. Chuyia is 8 years old.

According to Hindu custom, vestiges of which remain today, in life a woman is half her husband. Thus, by definition, after a spouse dies a widow is half-dead. She can finish the job by being cremated on her husband's funeral pyre. She can reenter society by marrying her husband's brother, if he has one.

Or, as in the case of Chuyia, there is a third option, a kind of limbo - an ascetic half-life in a widows' ashram where, for the rest of her days, she will deny herself sweets, spices and color, and shroud herself in white widows' weeds that render her a social untouchable.

Profound, passionate and overflowing with incomparable beauty, Water, like the prior two films in director Deepa Mehta's "Elements" trilogy, celebrates the lives of women who resist marginalization by Indian society. Set at the dawn of modern India, Mehta's film frames Chuyia's struggle for freedom with that of Mahatma Gandhi seeking India's independence from Britain.

At the ashram the question is, how do you solve a problem like Chuyia? The spirited 8-year-old (played with impudent charm by Sarala, a nonprofessional from Sri Lanka) isn't in the Benares' house of widows by choice. Why must she shave off her hair, mourn a man she hardly met, and not speak to people on the banks of the Ganges?

Chuyia swiftly sizes up the inmates in the house of widows. On one end of the spectrum is the pious Shakuntula (heartbreaking Seema Biswas, who played the title role in Bandit Queen). On the other is the profane Madhumati (Manorama), the house mother who employs a eunuch to pimp the services of a pretty widow whose extracurricular activities support the household.

The pretty one is Kalyani (ethereally beautiful Lisa Ray, not for nothing known as the Indian Angelina Jolie), segregated from the others.

Before Chuyia comes to the ashram, Shakuntula and Kalyani had been resigned to their fates. But when the young girl demands to know why they must live this way, it's as though a dam has burst.

When jawdroppingly beautiful Kalyani meets heartstoppingly handsome Brahmin Narayan (Bollywood hunk John Abraham), an idealistic follower of Gandhi, she no longer feels unworthy.

Exquisitely photographed by Giles Nuttgens in shades of bottle green and sea-glass blue, Mehta's film combines humanist drama and Bollywood romance.

Embracing tradition and change, religion and reform, Mehta's movie is a perfectly scaled miniature that tells an epic story.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Water **** (out of four stars)

Produced by David Hamilton, written and directed by Deepa Mehta, photography by Giles Nuttgens, music by Mychael Danna and A.R. Rahman, distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures. In Hindi with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 54 mins.

Chuyia. . . Sarala

Shakuntula. . . Seema Biswas

Kalyani. . . Lisa Ray

Narayan. . . John Abraham

Madhumati. . . Manorama

Parent's guide: PG-13 (mature themes, brief drug use, hint of prostitution)

Playing at: Ritz Five, Ritz Sixteen/NJ