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Fire

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Canada, India · 1997
1h 48m
Director Deepa Mehta
Starring Nandita Das, Shabana Azmi, Javed Jaffrey, Kulbhushan Kharbanda
Genre Drama, Romance

Radha, in a devoted but sexless marriage to an amateur swami who seeks enlightenment through celibacy, finds her life changed when she meets her new sister-in-law Sita, who is also unhappy in her marriage and seeking companionship. The first mainstream movie in Indian cinema to explore a same-sex relationship, Fire is a landmark film.

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What are critics saying?

60

Empire by David Parkinson

Audacious, yet sensitive, Fire may shock traditionalists but is the sort of film that ought to win Indian cinema a whole new audience.

88

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

Mehta has created a pair of memorable characters who are easy to empathize with, and who gratifyingly are never transformed from flesh-and-blood individuals into mere symbols.

50

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

Fire is designed to provoke questions and spark debate. Mission accomplished, but, despite a heartfelt tone that pervades its every moment, it doesn't do much else.

70

The New York Times by Lawrence Van Gelder

Written and directed by Deepa Mehta, this glossy melodrama, mixing references to Indian mysticism and the epic poetry of the "Ramayana" with late-20th-century feminism, teeters unsteadily between sociology and soap opera.

80

Chicago Reader by Lisa Alspector

Writer-director Deepa Mehta fuses the soap-opera elements of her plot -- which reveals one sexual secret after another of the variously betrayed, selfish, and self-actualizing members of the two couples' New Delhi household--into profound drama.

75

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The two women are very beautiful, gentle and sad together, and the movie is all but stolen by Chowdhry, as the servant who lurks constantly in the background providing, with his very body language, a comic running commentary.

50

San Francisco Examiner by Walter Addiego

The title comes from Indian legend in which Lord Rama tests the purity of his wife by a flaming ordeal (which we see enacted in an open-air pageant with comic overtones of Bunuel). This bit of mythology too handily prefigures a major element in the film's conclusion.

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