This movie has a Sri Lankan producer. It is showing on Thursday and Friday in New York City, April 22 and 25 at the San Francisco Film Festival http://www.sfiff.org/fest04/titleDetail.asp?title_id=50, in Toronto in May and various other places around North America after winning many awards in Europe. Ed.
MOVIE REVIEW | ‘SILENT WATERS’
The New York Timeshttp://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/03/30/movies/30WATE.html
A Pakistani Approaches Manhood Angry and Brutish
By ELVIS MITCHELL
Silent Waters” is several different movies, and most of them feel negligible and meandering, until the film finally packs a wallop. The director, Sabiha Sumar, starts the film in 1979 with a widow, Ayesha, doting on her 18-year-old son, Saleem, who walks around their small Pakistani village with the uncomplicated, bored smile of a milk-fed prince.
 |
| . |
“My Saleem was special from birth, and he knows it,” she says with a smile. He secretly carries on with Zubeida, who wants eventually to marry him. Zubeida’s aims — attending college and finding work after she graduates — grate on him somewhat, but he seems to be trying to find a way to make peace with her goals. Ayesha lets her sheepish son know that Zubeida is just what she wants in a daughter-in-law, which follows because the girl has a serene warmth similar to her own.
“Silent Waters,” which plays tonight and Thursday and Friday nights in the New Directors/New Films series, takes on a more substantial bent when a fundamentalist wind blows in. Two sullen Muslim radicals from Lahore arrive at the little town, and their closed-mindedness initially makes them the butts of jokes in the barber shop.
The village elders are tickled by the fundamentalists’ rigidity and humorlessness and don’t take them seriously. Even Saleem jokes that one of them looks a bit constipated, but he is also taken by the forcefulness of their ideas. He begins to spend more time with the radicals and abandons the quieter life at his mother’s side.
Saleem’s gentleness erodes, and the movie gathers power as he become angrier and brutish. A thoughtless joke one of the radicals makes about Sufis splits his face into a full, murderous grin; it’s one of the few times he smiles, and it comes at the expense of humanity.
Saleem’s changes are standard teenage rebellion given a horrific political import. Ayesha’s son is growing away from her in a way that she would never have imagined; it even dovetails with nightmares of her past.
In this section, when Saleem fulfills himself by traveling with the Muslims, whose philosophies fit with Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq’s introduction of Islamic law to the country, “Silent Waters” is reminiscent of Louis Malle’s 1974 “Lacombe, Lucien,” in which a French farm boy finds meaning in his life when he begins to travel with the Nazis.
Saleem feels as if he is becoming a man, but his behavior is actually less mature. He’s now part of a gang. Missing a father for 10 years, he’s easy prey, and when his eyes go cold and unforgiving, the question for Ayesha is, has he disappeared forever? Disappearance becomes a separate issue when more of her past is revealed.
The complexity, political and familial, gives “Silent Waters” a shape, and the director’s own confidence grows as she moves the film into a drama with larger ramifications. As the movie becomes fuller and more emotionally detailed, Ms. Sumar shows more confidence than she did when establishing the simpler, bucolic life that sets the movie up.
The dream world of the outset feels superficial and secondhand. But the director, who also worked on the script, unearths a wealth of melodrama, and it is worth sitting through a sluggish wedding musical number that seems a Bollywood cliché in need of rejecting.
There is an unfortunate reference to the title in the climax of “Silent Waters” that the movie could also do without. But a line of Ayesha’s from early in the film has more significance than she might have thought, and it’s worth paying attention to, since Ms. Sumar has taste and brains enough not to have it repeated: “Life catches up with you.”
SILENT WATERS
Directed by Sabiha Sumar; written (in Urdu and Punjabi, with English subtitles) by Ms. Sumar and Paromita Vohra; director of photography, Ralph Netzer; edited by Bettina Böhler; music by Madan Gopal Singh; produced by Philippe Avril, S. Sathananthan and Helge Albers; released by First Run Features. Running time: 99 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown tonight at 6 p.m. and Thursday at 8:30 p.m. at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, at Lincoln Center, and Friday at 8:15 p.m. at the MoMA Gramercy Theater, 127 East 23rd Street, Manhattan, as part of the 33rd New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the department of film and media of the Museum of Modern Art.
WITH: Kiron Kher (Ayesha), Aamir Malik (Saleem), Navtej Johar Singh (Jaswant), Shilpa Shukla (Zubeida), Salman Shahid (Amin), Kamran Mujahid (Zubair) and Anusche Chapra (Veru).
Originally published March 31, 2004