After Critical And Box Office Failure Of Midnight’s Children – Deepa Mehta To Tackle Adoption Tale

MUMBAI – This may or may not bea good thing, but when one meets theIndia-born Canadian resident directorDeepa Mehta, the first thing that crossesyour mind is the controversy surroundingsome of her movies. When I ran intoher at the ongoing Mumbai Film Festival,where she is on one of the juries, she wasnot too pleased about this link.“There have been other things in mylife,” she was a trifle irritated, and whenI asked her for an interview, she quippedthat I have not even been keeping trackof her work. Not true though.I know she had helmed movies suchas Bollywood/Hollywood, Heaven onEarth and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’sChildren – apart from the trilogy of Fire,Earth and Water.Fire provoked fire; hardline Hindunationalists saw it as a celebration of lesbianism(wonder how they let the Festivalscreen the sexually graphic lesbian story,Blue is the Warmest Colour), while Mehtascreamed that it was not. And it was not.It was all about relationships, and sex orjust about a hint of it between two womenin the movie was purely incidental.Then came Water, which had thefundamentalists once again on a warpath.The leading ladies of the film, NanditaDas and Shabana Azmi, had tonsuredtheir heads and were all set for the shootin Varanasi, when they were literally drivenout of the city along with Mehta andthe other members of her team. Thistime, the contention was that Mehta wasfilming a story about the widows of Vrindavan.They were being shown in poorlight. As if nobody knew about them andtheir torturous existence in horrible widowhomes.Eventually, Mehta did make the movie,but after five years with a different cast:Lisa Ray, Seema Biswas and John Abraham.But they were poor substitutes forShabana and Nandita. Ray looked morelike a model, and far from the young widowshe played. Abraham was his woodenbest. Yes, Biswas was a redeeming featureof sorts.But during my conversation (whichDeepa did allow), Mehta – who shot Waterin Sri Lanka – would not agree thatNandita and Shabana would have madethe film far, far better than what it was.Well, leaving the trilogy behind, Mehtawas all set to do a film on KomagataMaru. This was a Japanese ship that sailedwith 376 Indians from Punjab to Vancouverin 1914, but only 20 were allowed toenter Canada. The rest had to return toIndia, enduring a lot of suffering.Mehta had the money and the scriptready, but then Midnight’s Children came.The book’s author, Salman Rushdie, was afriend, and the film happened very quickly.It was a huge volume, and would havebeen very difficult to film.Although Rushdie helped Mehta withthe screenplay and adaptation, the moviewas largely criticised. It was indeed disappointing,did not quite emotionally connect.Some went to the extent of calling ita nightmare. I found the film to be a bigyawn. It did not grip me, the way Fire hador even Earth.Now, Mehta is about to shoot SecretDaughter, based on a book by ShilpiSomaya Gowda. The plot is about a girlchild, about adoption, and unfolds in Indiaand San Francisco. Principal photographywill begin in March, and the moviewill be ready for Toronto in September2014.Mehta loves Toronto, loves India too.But India does not like me, she rues. Thisis why most of her shoots have takenplace in Sri Lanka, which I suppose passesoff for India’s West coast.