Curated for Pride Library, University of Western Ontorio, Canada
Copyright Sridhar Rangayan, 2009
Please write to us for permission to use any text on this site
DISCLAIMER: All interpretations and readings is by the author. All the images and videos on this site have been used only for reference, collated from sources on the internet.
CREDITS
Title: Fire
Year: 1996
Language: English
Genre: Feature
Director: Deepa Mehta
SYNOPSIS
Fire is a delicate, tender story about two women finding love while caught in the bounds of tradition, a joint family, a somewhat tyrannical mother-in-law with a bell and a bed in the central location of the house, and self-consumed husbands. Sita (Nandita Das) comes into the household as the younger daughter-in-law, married to a man (Jaaved Jaaferi) in love with another woman and with no tenderness or kindness for Sita. With both husbands ignoring their spouses' emotional and sexual needs (albeit with reasons that are totally opposite from each other), it is only a matter of time before Radha and Sita look to one another for comfort and to satisfy their own passions. But their love is not without its share of painful obstacles.
QUEER NOTES
The moments of tenderness between Radha and Sita are little eddies of erotic poetry that seem to touch only the two women without being noticed by their husbands.11 While some felt that the two unhappy women in the same family would first bond emotionally, then maybe explore a physical relationship, many were troubled me that the film somehow implies that a woman is driven towards her attraction to another woman because her husband won't sleep with her. Being the first film to portray lesbian relationship in the Indian context, it caused a riot with theaters being burnt down.
ACTOR/S IN QUEER ROLE
Shabana Azmi as Sita and Nandita Das as Radha (Lesbian relationship)
LINKS
Imdb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0116308/
Wikipedia: http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_(film)
queer portrayals in Indian films