I've been struck by the presence of water in Ratnam's films. In this film, as in Roja and in Mouna Ragam, it's during a monsoon or on a seashore that emotion begins to take hold of the characters, as though it's a force of nature, a flood, which is humanly impossible to resist. In Mouna Ragam, Divya is seized by joy and dances her way through a monsoon rather than return to her father's house to meet her suitor. In Roja, Roja and her sisters play insouciantly in the river at the beginning of the film, before larger events begin to dictate their choices. And now in Bombay, Shekhar returns from journalism school in a damp mist, pines for Shaila Bano as he glimpses her crossing the river on her way from school, stows away amongst the schoolgirls in the ferry boat and first speaks with her when they're on the water, and meets her on the rocks below the old fort, in the spray from the crashing surf. Shekhar sings: "I am a river of desires; I flow into the oceans."

It is rather amazing that Shekhar is set on marriage, and Shaila Bano accedes, when they've hardly had time to hold any substantive and extended conversation! But I suppose that that is the nature of this love-story archetype; it's much the same in, say, Romeo and Juliet. There is a formula to be obeyed -- but I find myself rather wishing that Ratnam had begun taking liberties with that formula earlier in the film.

Ratnam is concerned with the power of the abstract and the ideological to produce injustices at the level of the concrete and the individual. This theme of course turned up in Roja but here in Bombay is the scene that most evokes it: during the riots, the camera pans to a front door marked with a Hindu swastika — an abstract symbol which, in its placement on the door of the house, becomes identified with the physical door and walls of the house. A hand, OUTSIDE THE DOOR, throws a firebrand to set it alight, and the camera moves with the fire as the fire BREACHES THE HOUSE — and, by extension, breaches the abstraction signified by the swastika, moving from an urge to destroy Hinduism in the abstract to an urge to destroy these Hindu people in this house. Once the flames and the camera enter, there is time only for one line — a child's "Amma!" — before the house becomes engulfed.

Ratnam is quite fond of a smoky, angled light, forming sunbeams, at moments of painful enlightenment. We saw this cinematographic trope in Roja as Liyaqat, tutored by Rishi Kumar, began to reject violence after learning of his younger brother's innocent death. We see the same effect now in Bombay, when Shekhar finds the grandparents' burnt remains and tells Shaila Bano, "They have left us forever." Most effective is the choice of the handheld camera that follows the ghastly tour of Shaila Bano and Shekhar through the children's ward, giving the effect of a roving eye through this catalogue of misery.

There is a lot of moralising in Bombay, as there is in Roja, and much of it is transparently direct. (Shekhar's "It's the innocent who are being killed in your conflict!") On the other hand, the film was released less than three years after the riots and perhaps subtlety wasn't what was needed at the time, with an Indian nationalist government still in power as a consequence of reaction to the violence. (Shekhar's speech at the film's climax does speak directly to that issue, accusing the politicians of profiting from the violence and saying that they're the ones who deserve the mob's hatred.) Nevertheless, this hit-you-over-the-head message does seem to cheapen the art, making the picture a bit less cinema and a bit more socio-political propaganda, a bit less of a 'film' and more of a 'movie.'

In Bombay as in Roja, the point of view of an innocent is used as a lens through which to illustrate the conflict's absurdity: just as an innocent Roja receives an explanation of the Kashmir conflict, in Bombay one of the twins, rescued from the street by an old woman, asks why it is that two paths to God must fight each other.

Through the second half of this film I found myself on the edge of my seat with my teeth against my fingernails. Bits of it, like bits of Roja, brought tears to the eye.