Set in contemporary New Delhi, Fire is a sumptuously photographed and poignant story of two women trapped in unsuccessful arranged marriages within the confines of a traditional Indian family. It is a film about desire and the cloaking of desire thwarted passions, spiritual obsessions, soured aspiration, secret lives and isolation.  

Ultimately, Fire is about a family which must come to terms with the deep contradictions that exist between old and new, spiritual and material, and Eastern versus Western cultural values in today's India.  

For 15 years, Radha (Indian star Shabana Azmi, seen in the Hollywood films Madame Sousatzka, City of Joy)) has lived the role of the consummate Indian wife in an arranged marriage, displaying unwavering devotion to her husband Ashok (Kulbushan Kharbanda). They live with Ashok's brotheer Jatin and mother BiJi above the family's take-out restaurant, where Radha cooks for the customers and takes care of the mother.  

Jatin has been pressured into an arranged marriage with a young woman named Sita, despite being involved in a long-term relationship with another woman, Julie, whom he has no intentions of letting go. Each family member struggles to seek expression of their own personal needs and desires. But the pressure to maintain some semblance of allegiance to the firmly rooted traditions of Indian family life becomes, in the end, too much to bear.  

Director Deepa Mehta is a masterful storyteller. Fire adeptly turns the story of one family's struggle into a metaphor for the major transitions taking place across the entire subcontinent off India today.