Oscar-nominated writer/director Deepa Mehta has been criticized in some conservative circles for her progressive views on the role of women in Indian society. Her most successful film to date, Water, depicted a woman who, after being widowed during infancy, was forced to live the rest of her life in a poor monastery. The film inspired protests that were supported by the Indian government.
Her latest work, Heaven on Earth, follows Chand (Bollywood icon Preity Zinta, in a revelatory performance), a young woman who moves to Canada to enter into an arranged marriage. Upon arrival, Chand finds that her new husband Rocky (Vansh Bhardwaj) is cruel and abusive, providing her with pitiful living conditions.
When Chand confides in a co-worker about this frequent spousal abuse, she is told to grind a particular root into his drink that will supposedly make him love her forever. This recipe proves to have unforeseen consequences. Mehta is unblinking in her depiction of domestic violence, filming scenes of the couple’s home life with unsettling intimacy.
When I spoke with Mehta, I assumed the arranged marriage was the film’s centre. “Who cares about arranged marriages?” she said. “Arranged marriages happen in our country, Canada, through computers—you know, ‘MatchMaker.com.’ That’s an arranged marriage. The movie is about [immigration], when you give up everything that you have known, and have no relations.”
She looked straight at me. “If you go to India, you will be lost. It’s a mainstream white myth that I wanted to break.”
What exactly is this myth? “In Canada, working class immigrants have no dignity. And people in the mainstream are used to seeing how somebody makes [a successful living in their adopted country], or they’re used to seeing films about Bollywood.”
“The reason I made the movie is this is something that really bugs me.”
Mehta paints a nightmarish portrait of cultural displacement. Chand, whose grasp of the English language is modest with an understanding of Canadian society that is even more negligible, is symbolic of the common existential crises of immigrants moving westward. She is stripped of power and treated as sub-human, unfamiliar with even the most commonplace customs of her new country.
Mehta explained the central emotional and psychological dilemma of many immigrants. “What people generally lose is their sense of self. That’s what this movie is about.”
“Canada is a country of immigrants. It’s not heaven on earth. Some of us really do well as coloured people in a white country, but some of us are ghettoized, and some of us are marginalized. Some of us have no recourse—we can’t even read outside a certain environment. Yet, we work from 9 to 12 every day, and half our money goes to tax dollars. What are we getting? We are not getting dignity. Everybody in Heaven on Earth is a victim.”
