Movie Review : ‘Earth’ Dissects a Nation on Political, Personal Fronts

The best thing about “Earth,” the new film by Indian-born writer-director Deepa Mehta, is its ambition. A filmmaker without fear of large subjects--she called her last film “Fire” and has one called “Water” coming up-- Mehta here takes on the broadest possible canvas, the agonizing 1947 partition that turned the subcontinent into two nations divided by religion, Hindu and Sikh India and Muslim Pakistan.

Far from being a dead issue, the wounds between the two countries have festered over the years, until now each nation is threatening the other with nuclear catastrophe. How could it be otherwise, when, as an on-screen text informs us, 1 million people died and some 12 million others were uprooted from their homes in what has to be the largest exchange of populations on record?

“Earth” is adapted from an autobiographical novel called “Cracking India” by Bapsi Sidhwa, the story of what a young polio-afflicted girl named Lenny Sethna (Maia Sethna) experiences as an 8-year-old living in Lahore in the fateful spring of the partition.

Lenny’s parents are well-to-do Parsees, a neutral sect that has always tried to be, her mother tells her, the invisible yet sweet sugar in India’s coffee. But, as an opening scene of a British administrator and a patriotic Sikh literally coming to blows at a Sethna dinner party illustrates, the days when Parsees could retreat to the tranquillity of their privileged lives is over.

Filmmaker Mehta, whose 1997 “Fire” successfully focused on the personal story of two married women who develop a sexual attraction for each other, works with cinematographer Giles Nuttgens and production designer Aradhana Seth to re-create vivid snapshots of a country in turmoil.

The striking visuals include the flowing green banners of a pro-Pakistan demonstration, the horror of discovering the evidence of a massacre on a train, and street battles that include Muslim firemen apparently spraying gasoline on fires set in Hindu tenements.

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All this is well and good, but “Earth” also has several personal stories to tell, and these are not as satisfactorily realized as the historical re-creations.

The personal part of the story, as observed by Lenny, involves the romantic life of her nanny or ayah, the warmly beautiful Shanta (“Fire’s” Nandita Das). Though she is Hindu, Shanta’s attractiveness is such that suitors of all religious persuasions flock around her “like moths around a flame”--just one of the script’s typical pieces of dead-on writing,

The two key suitors are both Muslims. One, ice candy seller Dil Navaz (Indian superstar Aamir Khan), is a suave and supercilious rascal, which may be the reason Lenny hopes Shanta will fancy him. Also very much in the running is masseur Hasan (Rahul Khanna, MTV Asia’s first video deejay), whose soulful eyes and sincere demeanor are hard to argue against.

The problem with this aspect of “Earth” is twofold. One is that telling things through the eyes of a spoiled, precocious, troublemaking 8-year-old narrator is both an overdone device and not a particularly engaging one. Also, writer-director Mehta’s dramatic taste tends to run to the strongly melodramatic, making a lot of what happens between these people both overly obvious and a cause of a fair amount of impatience.

When things get worse for India, when religious groups who have lived together for centuries start demanding their own land at any cost, things get better for “Earth.” No one knows which country Lahore will be made part of and, in the interim, as one person says: “Fear is making people do crazy things.”

So “Earth” shows us friends at one another’s throats, people changing religion under duress, even one family marrying its 10-old-daughter to an aging dwarf whose only virtue is his neutral Christianity. “The apocalypse is here,” someone says, and the world of Lenny and her chameleon-like parents, who believe “ballroom dancing is the best invention of the English,” is fated to disappear almost without a trace.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: detailed verbal descriptions of massacre atrocities and a scene of a man about to be pulled in half by automobiles.

‘Earth’

Aamir Khan: Dil Navaz

Nandita Das: Shanta

Rahul Khanna: Hasan

Maia Sethna: Lenny

Released by Zeitgeist Films. Director Deepa Mehta. Producers Deepa Mehta, Anne Masson. Executive producers David Hamilton, Jhamu Sughand. Screenplay by Deepa Mehta, based on the novel “Cracking India” by Bapsi Sidhwa. Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens. Editor Barry Farrell. Costumes Dolly Ahluwalia. Music A.H. Rahman. Production design Aradhana Seth. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

At selected theaters.