The Most Beautiful Woman in the World?
Lisa Ray discusses race, beauty and the humanism of film

by Jackie Wong

At the 2005 Vancouver Internantional Film Festival, Schema Magazine met up with filmmaker Deepa Mehta and Actor Lisa Ray to talk about Mehta's, now, critically acclaimed film, Water. We've been sitting on this article for almost a year, hoping it would be the cover story for our first print issue. With our sites on a video podcast, there's no need to hide this gem any longer.

Lisa Ray, do you know where your photos are?  

A quick internet search for one of the most prominent new faces of Canadian cinema turns up of a goldmine of fan material, most of it created when fan sites featuring Lisa Ray outnumbered the fan sites of every other celebrity in the world. Lisa Ray mp3 skins. Desktop wallpaper. Swimsuit galleries. Discussion forums like the ones featured on www.bollywoodkingdom2000.tripod.com, www.starswelove.com and www.indianceleb.com that often describe her as "the most beautiful woman in the world," a "hot Canadian/Indian beauty" and a "model turned actress."

Much of the attention showered on Ray focuses almost exclusively on her good looks that are popularly--and, perhaps, misguidedly--understood to rely heavily on her Canadian citizenship and Bengali/Polish ancestry. While many of the fan sites claim that they include in-depth information about Ray, few discuss her accomplishments as an actor unless they are connected to her earlier work as a model. Such attention cloaks her acting achievements, including her most recent project: the lead role in Deepa Mehta's film Water , the final instalment in an acclaimed trilogy that kicked off the Vancouver International Film Festival last fall. Schema caught up with her to discuss the film and the production process. It soon became evident that the white noise of internet adoration hasn't gone to her head. Nonetheless, Ray's looks--and her hybrid ethnicity--continue to influence how she is popularly perceived, both by fans and the film industry.

In Water, Ray plays the role of Kalyani, the prettiest widow in an ashram, or widows' colony, in pre-independent India. At the time, Indian convention dictated that a woman's life ended with the death of her husband, and many found themselves living in isolation and poverty in these ashrams, run by a widow hierarchy. Water chronicles the relationships within this particular ashram, and focuses on Kalyani, an elderly woman and a child bride.

"It's the kind of cinema that I've always aspired to do and it's the kind of cinema that we don't have enough of, which is the cinema that holds up a mirror, that provokes, that makes you question," enthuses Ray. "It provokes questions about injustice, discrimination, indifference to discrimination.

"The only thing that I despair of is . . . there seem to be some people [who] don't understand the film in the sense that they find the film very offensive. And that bothers me because neither is there anything offensive in the film, nor is it meant to offend. It is, in fact, in the tradition of great humanism."  

While Ray raves about the politics of the film, her role as Kalyani presents a mixed   blessing: she is making significant waves in Canadian cinema, yet such success still seems contingent on her continued casting as an ethnic beauty.

Because she is the most beautiful widow in the ashram, Kalyani is forced to work as a prostitute to support the others. Beyond its gates, Kalyani meets Narayana, a young law student who defies the stigma of widowhood and falls in love with her. This relationship , though fictive, mirrors the challenges Ray often confronts: transcending the public's compulsion to align her beauty with race, and, by extension, transcending reactions to this racialized beauty in her acting. Kalyani's forced prostitution largely occurs because of her beauty. However, Kalyani attracts and meets a man who is willing to love and marry her, so her beauty is also the ticket to freedoms that would be otherwise unavailable.  

Similarly, it was Lisa Ray's physical attractiveness that led her to modelling; she was first approached by a modeling scout during a family vacation in Mumbai. In the years following her return home to Toronto, Ray returned to India for modelling jobs that landed her on the covers of magazines and in television ads.   Such was the beginning of Lisa Ray internet fandom, and now, many years and career developments later, audience and media discussion continues to focus on her beauty as a Polish-Bengali Canadian. As Liam Lacey notes in a 2002 article in The Globe and Mail , "her exoticism--the auburn hair, green eyes--were her signature, but she was versatile, capable of looking sexy and Western or regally Indian." Is it possible to appreciate her accomplishments as an actor free of race-based points of reference?

During the production of Water , Ray was not oblivious to audience expectations of her ethnic performance. Regarding difficulties in centering her role as Kalyani, Ray notes that, "despite the fact that I'm half-Indian, I'm sure that people would also be quick to point out if I didn't get the nuances right [of an] Indian village girl." She is acutely aware that race is not only something defined by the colour of one's skin, but an identity that is performed, received and shaped. This performance nature of race, then, suggests that it is as fluid a concept as the water after which Deepa Mehta's film is named.

While Water is situated in India, it directly challenges ideas of nationhood and citizenship by critically interrogating the country and its citizens during one of the most politically-charged times in India's recent history. The questions asked in the film -- questions of loyalties, the heart, and the loss and renewal of both--transcend the geographical boundaries in which Water is contained. Similarly, it is hoped that Ray's role in the film will help her transcend previous pigeonholes as an ethnic movie star, allowing her to enter an acting arena that places less emphasis on her exoticism and more on her skills as an actor. "I...hope that people won't politicize the film before seeing it." Ray says. "Just go in. Watch the film."

Ray describes her role as Kalyani as "a challenge on every single level technically. [Trying to] get into the mindset of a character [who], when you first see her, [is described] as an angel--it's really tough to do," she notes. "Because we live in a cynical world...it's really hard to get that balance of being genuinely vulnerable and genuinely innocent. There are very few innocent souls left."  

For all its blemishes, Ray is ready to embrace the world. Now with homes in Toronto, Mumbai, and London, Ray is living proof that the Canadian cinemascape covers more distance than anyone might have ever predicted. And if her continuing career is any indication, the scene will not be growing any smaller. The resonance of Water testifies that Lisa Ray has arrived, and she's sure to challenge how we think about race and beauty well into the next decade.