Heaven on Earth: possibly Deepa Mehta’s strongest

Reel Alternatives' next film on Dec. 1 is Heaven on Earth, written and directed by Deepa Mehta, one of Canada's most distinguished contemporary filmmakers. Best known for her famed trilogy Fire, Earth and the multiple-award-winning Water, as well as the more whimsical Bollywood/Hollywood, Mehta now highlights the isolation and disappointment faced by a family of Punjabi immigrants to Canada.

A young Indian woman, Chand (Bollywood superstar Preity Zinta), is involved in an arranged marriage with an Indo-Canadian who, as it turns out, is highly abusive. When she arrives in Brampton, Ontario to meet her new husband, she leaves behind a loving family and supportive community. Now, in a new country, she finds herself living in a modest suburban home with seven other people and two part-time tenants. Inside the home, she is at the mercy of her husband's temper and her mother-in-law's controlling behaviour.

Desperate and unable to contact her family, Chand turns to a fellow factory worker, Rosa, who gives her a magical potion that will make whomever drinks it fall in love with Chand immediately. With this elixir, Mehta injects an element of magic realism, and the film morphs into a portrait of Chand's deeply divided mental state.

Heaven on Earth may be Mehta's strongest work to date because of her insistence on the collective liability for the acts of a individual. Her husband's coldness and temper may be the primary causes of Chand's unhappiness, but he has numerous — albeit often passive — accomplices, most importantly his domineering mother.

Simply put, this is a brilliant work by one of our most daring filmmakers — humanist and empathetic even toward its villains, yet at the same time a universal indictment, refusing to let any of us off the hook.