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10 January 2006
Waterborne
I finished watching, in many parts, 'Waterborne' -- a surprisingly good indie movie today. What made this viewing different was that for one thing, it is amongst the first of many instances of independently-made movies being released directly to a wider audience via the Internet, and Google Video in particular. This bodes well both for the movie-lovers as well as for the movie-makers whose labours of love do not go entirely unnoticed. 'Waterborne' is in many respects quite akin to the other brilliant ensemble-piece based in L.A. that has been doing the media rounds in the run-up to the Academy Awards, Crash. In a smaller way, and not because of its limitations as an independently-helmed movie or any lack of starpower but because its theme attempts to encompass a much larger scope of issues, 'Waterborne' deals with racial tensions in the same searing manner that made 'Crash' so riveting. It tells the story of a number of 'Los Angelenos' -- not even an exotic-sounding name however manages to fuse ten million people, a million of which are on the roads at any given time, into one collective entity -- who are suddenly dealing with a shortage of water owing to poisoning of the water supply. The one niggling shortcoming of the movie was that as imaginative, relevant and refreshingly original the premise of the movie is, Ben Rekhi somewhat yields to the temptation of leveraging it to deal with the equally sensitive, though clichéd plotline about stereotyping and racism. So a movie that starts off to be about eco-terrorism and its horrible shadows of Doomsday scenarios ends up giving mere glimpses of the Apocalypse playing up the race angle instead. Nonetheless, props to the producers for backing the movie as well as taking the bold and pioneering step and opting for wider dissemination over a few days of limited release in some forsaken art-house cinema in some place in Colorado nobody has heard of. I daresay that in the following years, the movie will perhaps be remembered more for this than for its snatches of the chill to come.* * * * *
