Fire is a hothouse family melodrama with radical social underpinnings. Set in a New Delhi middle-class home, this film by Canadian-Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta is spoken in English though filmed in India. Within a tradition-bound society, Fire depicts two women's discovery of lesbian desire and self-expression, freedoms that directly challenge the social order and the conventional family unit. Following an arranged marriage, Sita (Das) joins the extended family of her new husband Jatin (Jaaferi), a household that includes his brother Ashok (Kjarbanda) and his wife Radha (Azmi, a pre-eminent Bollywood film star), their aged mother (Rekhi), and their houseboy Mundu (Chowdhry). This tale of two marriages details the emotional and sexual neglect experienced by the two sisters-in-law. The lovelessness of Sita and Jatin's arranged marriage is established from the get-go, as Jatin clearly prefers the company of his vivacious, Westernized girlfriend from China who wants nothing to do with marrying into the repressive Hindu family unit. Radha and Ashok's longtime marriage suffers from their inability to conceive a child and Ashok's consequent devotion to a religious swami who teaches marital celibacy. It's within this confined world of ritual practices and social customs that the two neglected wives find companionship and sexual comfort in each other's arms. Sita is the bolder one, Radha proceeds more cautiously; but yet, the outcome is inevitable: Their defiance uproots the family structure and threatens the religious beliefs that govern their lives. Fire is an odd amalgam of Western subject matter about sexual role-playing and social stratification and the floridly elaborate traditions of the Indian cinema (the most productive national cinema in the world) that largely relegates women to sexual objects in a host of lurid yet oddly chaste films in a variety of styles. In fact, one of the issues raised by the film is that the Hindi language has no official word to describe what the two women are doing. Fire's flat-out depiction of average middle-class existence in New Delhi is eye-opening; the inherent implausibility of the story's incendiary melodrama can be traced to the country's highly stylized film traditions. Still, for a film with such volatile subject matter, the performances are subdued and naturalistic. Fire burns with a rare flame.

3.0 stars