Deepa Mehta should never have been allowed to finish making this trilogy on her own terms, or so the government thugs who burned down her sets in Varanasi seemed to think. If I'm honest, the whole production history of the thing overshadows the opening twenty minutes in a way that makes objectivity basically impossible, but let's try anyway. The film opens in 1938 British India with a child widow being carried across a river that looks less like a geographical feature and more like a grey soup of historical guilt, and straight away you notice the sound mixing on the oars dipping into the water is just a little too clean, like someone boosted the treble in post-production to compensate for an empty room.

Lisa Ray as Kalyani looks so astonishingly modern that you half-expect her to check a wristwatch underneath her sari, which is an unfair criticism perhaps because physical beauty isn't a crime, but it does create a weird disconnect when she's supposed to be starving in a communal ashram. She plays the tragic romantic lead with this wide-eyed sincerity that works when she's staring down John Abraham across a riverbank, though Abraham himself brings the exact same puppy-dog earnestness to his nationalist lawyer character that he brought to his early action flicks, only here he's wearing khadi and reciting Gandhi quotes with his jaw permanently clenched. They have zero chemistry, which might actually be the most realistic part of the movie given they met three days before shooting their first emotional collision, yet Mehta frames their stolen glances like they are starring in a lost Merchant Ivory outtake where nobody bothered to check if the period details lined up.

Seema Biswas as Shakuntala does the heavy lifting that the script refuses to distribute evenly among the supporting players, anchoring every scene she’s in with a terrifyingly quiet authority that makes the younger actors look like they are auditioning for a shampoo commercial. When she confronts the hypocrisy of the ashram elders who trade young widows for temple donations, Biswas doesn't raise her voice or shake her fists, she just drops her gaze with a mixture of disgust and exhaustion that feels earned by decades of watching women disappear into the margins of orthodox Hinduism. Kulbhushan Kharbanda is adequate as the lecherous priest who justifies his corruption through holy scriptures, though his dialogue delivery suffers from that distinct echoey quality you get when a studio actor is clearly looping their lines in a suburban Mumbai recording booth six months after the cameras wrapped.

Giles Nuttgens captures the dust and the blinding afternoon glare of the river ghats with a handheld camera that occasionally wobbles into melodrama, lingering on weeping faces just a beat longer than comfort allows. The soundtrack by A.R. Rahman uses these high-pitched female vocalizations that drift over the stone steps whenever something awful is about to happen, and after the fourth time it happens during a minor conversation about cooking oil, you start wishing for a bit of silence just to hear the crickets. It shares that heavy, humorless solemnity with Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan, though without the crowd-pleasing cricket match to break up the misery, these Hindi movies often confuse length with depth and misery with truth.

The screenplay wants to be a universal critique of patriarchal cruelty, yet it keeps getting bogged down in melodramatic plotting that wouldn't feel out of place in mainstream Bollywood melodramas from the same decade, just stripped of the songs and given a coat of prestige paint. Child marriage and enforced celibacy are horrific subjects that require sharp, scalpel-like writing, but Mehta uses a blunt instrument most of the time, hammering home the point that old men ruin young lives until the argument becomes numbing rather than piercing. There is a secondary plot involving a young girl named Chuyia, played with heartbreaking naturalness by Sarala Kariyawasam, whose tragic trajectory is telegraphed so early in the runtime that watching her play by the water feels like waiting for a falling plate to hit the stone floor.

You can see the stitches where the production had to move to Sri Lanka under a fake title because of local protests, and the shift in lighting quality between the Indian exterior footage and the island reconstructions is noticeable if you are paying attention to the color grading in the background foliage. It's a small thing that bugged me through the middle stretch, this sudden greenness that doesn't belong in the arid plains of Uttar Pradesh, reminding you that cinema is a logistical magic trick cobbled together by desperate people in parking lots and foreign jungles. The political outrage that greeted its release has long since faded into academic footnotes and festival retrospectives, leaving behind a movie that stands or falls on its melodramatic merits alone rather than its courage under fire.

The closing moments rush toward a train station departure that borrows heavily from The Burmese Harp in its emotional geography, pulling out to a wide shot of a steam locomotive cutting through the flat landscape while the characters scream names that get swallowed by the engine whistle. It is an abrupt, unearned conclusion that tries to buy back ten minutes of narrative drift with a single gesture of radical defiance, leaving the viewer stranded between historical tragedy and old-fashioned soap opera sentimentality. No one will ever accuse Mehta of lacking ambition, but ambition without narrative discipline results in a film that preaches to the choir while demanding an endurance test from everyone else in the row.