Earth (Deepa Mehta)
Picture: C
Sound: C+ Extras: D Film: C+
Three years later after stirring up India and the
international film world with Fire, Deepa Mehta returned in 1999 with Earth,
a hardened look at the chaos and insanity as Britain allows India to have its
“independence” in 1947. Told in
flashback from the experiences of a grown woman from when she was 8 years old,
the film shows us good times about to go bad as religious and political divisions
rear their heads with a violent vengeance.
In her continuing work against the Bollywood stereotype,
Mehta again addresses the true, hidden India.
Even though the film again has its limits, you do not need to know quite
as much about India’s culture as her debut feature Fire (see my review
elsewhere on the site) does. This is a
more confident film, if not always as daring.
The focus on a couple (Aamir Khan and Nandita Das) who are cursed, not
because they are the same gender this time, but because they are of different
religious backgrounds, again targets bigotry, Fascism, and hate simmering in
India then as it does now. The
performances also seem to flow together better than the last film. The film is about India in 1947 as much as
it is about the country now.
The widescreen image is anamorphically enhanced this time
at 1.78 X 1, looking better than the Fire transfer, but is still comes
across as odd. For whatever reason,
many scenes have a sped-up look as if it were being time compressed for
broadcast or Cable-TV broadcast, but this does not seem to have affected the
true running time. The video look of
the film image suggests this was done on a computer with some memory speed
limitations, but it does not hurt the playback as severely as it might otherwise
have. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
surround is from Dolby this time, making it sound fuller and better than the
Ultra Stereo on Fire. Mehta
obviously had more money to work with this time. The trailer for Earth is the only major extra here, but a
few other New Yorker trailers are also included.
Though she has much growth ahead of herself, Deepa Mehta
continues her upward arch as a filmmaker with something to say and Earth
continues that trend, offering a piece of history worth seeing.
- Nicholas Sheffo
