In her pioneering 1973 essay “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” filmmaker and theorist Claire Johnston argued thatwomen directorsmust dismantle the structures of domination associated with male bourgeois cinema before a women’s “counter-cinema” can emerge. This project is especially challenging for women directors of Shakespeare films—a genre which, historically, hasbeen almost the exclusive preserve of men. Deepa Mehta’s Water, a loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, approaches film as a medium for Foucauldian counter-memory, using Shakespeare’s play to critique the obscene paternalism of Hindu nationalism and to bring to light the repressed histories of India’s enormous widow population—a female underclass that has been silenced for more than two thousand years by religious fundamentalism, State-sanctioned gender oppression, and systemicsexual abuse. Featuringa love story between Narayan, a member of the elite Brahman caste and a passionate disciple of Ghandi, andKalyani, the beautiful young widow condemned to live out her days in an ashram, or widows’ home, as a pariah and sex slave, Waterdocuments a global tragedy, seducing the viewer into a dream of India’s nascent independence even as it exposes the extent to which fantasies of nationhood are dependent for their inscription on the female body-in-pain. Indeed, although Kalyani escapes her confines to elope with Narayan, she soon returns to the ashram where she drowns herself in shame. Uncompromising and unapologetic, Water is the work of a feminist auteur—a concept that entails redefining film authorship as direct political engagement; whether the term “auteur” is appropriate or even desirable in the context of a women’s counter-cinema is the subject of my conclusion.
“An élan of the soul”?: Counter-cinema and Deepa Mehta’s 
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