|
|
|
|
 |
|||
|
|
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
| ||||||||||||
|
|
Earth Review by
Jerry White
I
find it odd that India has submitted Deepa Mehta's new film Earth as its
entry for the Foreign Language film Oscar. It's understandable in one way; the
film's director and producer are Indian citizens, and it was made partially with
Indian money. There are two facts about the film, though, that bother me. The
first is obvious: a good deal of the film is in English, so trying to secure a
"Best Foreign Film" nomination doesn't make any more sense for Earth
than it would for Trainspotting. The second issue, though, is less
concrete. A big part of what makes Earth interesting is that it, like a
great deal of contemporary cinema, seems to almost slip the bounds of national
cinemas; it's a film that's not from or about India so much as it about and from
a messy collection of nations whose boundaries are always shifting around and
blurring (sometimes bleeding) into one another. This is a small but elite group
of recent films; I'd place Earth alongside works like Wayne Wang's Chinese
Box, Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book or Wong Kar-Wai's Days Of
Being Wild. These are movies whose national identity is not only hard to
pinpoint, but films for whom a sense of a complex world stuck between the fear
and loathing of xenophobia and the giddy confusion of a borderless, cosmopolitan
world is central. This complexity is at the very centre of Earth; what
gives the film its power is the way that Meeta shows just how second nature a
spirit of multi-nationalism was to the inhabitants of the subcontinent. Looking
at Earth just as the century turns is an especially instructive
experience. What
Mehta seems to be telling us is that contrary to popular (Western) belief, the
world did not get smaller over the last 100 years. She makes it abundantly clear
that for some people, the world became a whole lot more foreboding, that for
every wall that got knocked down, plenty of new ones were thrown up to take
their place. Overall, then, this is a very impressive film, occasionally falling
into symbolic traps that it seems to set for itself but still creating a lush,
visually rich portrait of a short time defined in equal part by radical promise
and bloodshed. The
film opens in 1947 and centres around a prosperous family of Parsees living in
Lahore (now part of Pakistan). The Parsees have always been small in number and
for that and other reasons are generally thought of as neutral in the
Hindu-Muslim-Sikh conflicts. Throughout the film, we see the tumultuous events
of 1947, such as independence, partition, ethnic rioting, mass migration and the
preparation for war, through the eyes of Lenny, an eight-year-old Parsee who has
a close relationship with her Hindu nanny, Shantra. One of their regular haunts
is a symbolically-loaded park, where a group of young men, some Hindu, some
Muslim, some Sikh, all sit around and talk. As the political climate heats up,
the conversations in the park become less genial, Lenny becomes more and more
confused, and the who region slowly slips into a morass of violence and
resentment. The
detail with which this conflict is presented is impressive; geopolitical
manoeuvring is certainly central to the film, but equally important are the
little rituals and hypocrisies that defined upper middle class life on 1940s
India. The scenes where Lenny plays with her friends, lolls around with Shanta
achieve a very tender lyricism that is tough to keep from turning into
sentimentality when you're dealing with a little kid. One scene where Lenny,
sitting in the back seat of a car, is accidentally driven into a small riot by
her arguing parents, is especially notable for the way that Mehta covers a truly
insane range of emotions with smoothness and depth. The power of this film,
then, lies very much in its details, in the wholeness and density of the world
it creates. Earth is very much about Lahore, and what it means to grow up
and live there during a specific historical period. Compared to how totally the
film is about Lahore, it's barely at all about what it means to be Indian or
Pakistani. Nation is the ever-present topic of the narrative, but in terms of
understanding the richly developed inner life of the characters, national
considerations hardly every appear on the radar screen. This paradox is what
give the film such life, such mystery, and what makes it seem so vibrant a part
of the post-national cinema that we can see emerging over the last decade. That
said, Mehta occasionally goes astray with heavy-handed allegorical gestures. The
above mentioned park is a minor example of this, although Mehta resists the urge
to go overload these images with symbolic value. One scene where her
metaphorical impulse gets the better of her, though, is when the neutral Parsee
family hosts a dinner attended by a pompous, tuxedoed Briton, a Sikh, a Hindu
and a Muslim, as the young, naive Lenny plays underneath the table. Guess what:
the dinner chat soon turns to politics and an angry, violent dispute breaks out
among the guests. I'm also not totally sure what to make of the closing sequence
[read no further if you do not want the end spoiled], when Lenny
is tricked into betraying Shanta, who is dragged from her house by a crazed band
of Muslim rioters. Are we supposed to take from this that apolitical innocents
often do more harm than they intend to? It's clear that Lenny, the child from a
historically neutral ethnic group, is supposed to be symbolic of something (but
what, exactly?), and the nastiness of this final betrayal that she is hoodwinked
into makes her seem especially central to the madness and consequent loss of
innocence that has engulfed the region. Again, two problems with this: I'm not
crazy about the use of a you
ng girl as a symbol for the woes of the subcontinent, and I'm not sure
how coherently this symbol is even developed (it's just sort of invoked but
never explained, unlike the much-too-clear symbolism of the dinner party). One
aspect of the film that more than makes up for these shortcomings, though, is
its look. Mehta's cinematographer Giles
Nuttgens has done
an excellent job of expressing the intensity of Lahore without going overboard
on the in romanticism. Like the careful way that Mehta shows us the details of
everyday life, the images in Earth are obsessively framed and sumptuously
photographed. Earth has its problems, but none of them are enough to
detract from the fact that this is a beautiful, heartfelt and heartbreaking film
about the passing of a truly trans-national Asia. Contents | Features | Reviews
| Books | Archives | Store |
|
|
