Art & Entertainment

No Fire In This Earth

It's come trailing clouds of hype, but Deepa Mehta's film 'Earth' fails to strike a raw chord

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No Fire In This Earth
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Sadly, despite a talented cast, Deepa Mehta's 'highly acclaimed' film Earth is little more than a celluloid equivalent of supper theatre. The problem with the film is that though it is based on Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, The Ice Candy Man, which revolves around the emotionally surcharged issue of Partition, the film evokes no strong feelings. Barring impatience.

The blame for this must lie squarely on Mehta's directorial shoulders. The very first scene in the film presages the easy cliches Mehta will use to tell a complex tale. The time's '47. The location: Lahore. Lenny Baby, an eight-year-old Parsi girl suffering from polio, hobbles into an elegant dining room in her father's home in Lahore. Picking up a plate, she crashes it on the floor. Then, tremulously, she asks her mother (played superbly by Kitu Gidwani, who excels despite Mehta!): 'How'll I go to the park after Lahore's partitioned?'

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Like the callow symbol of the crashing plate (later Lenny tears a doll in two to reinforce the point!), Mehta's film is full of sloppy short cuts that fail to explore or resonate. Ostensibly, the story is being told from Lenny baby's point of view, but we're never quite sure of this. Despite Lenny's ubiquitous presence (and a skilled performance by Maia Sethna), Mehta fails to imbue events in the film with the sense of a child's bewilderment or dread. Finally it is a director's vision that shapes the experience of a film. And Mehta's vision is a popcorn one, devoid of depth or consistency.

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The film, in fact, has no emotional core, no imaginative life of its own. It's as if Mehta put Sidhwa's book aside and looked up a paragraph on Partition in a school history textbook to get a grip on things. The motivational impulse of the story fades as Mehta concentrates on the stock images of Partition. Which make their appearance on cue, shorn of context or nuance. Midway through the film, just after Hasan, the Muslim maalishwala (in the unblinking shape of Rahul Khanna) has been romancing Shanta bibi, the Hindu ayah (played to coquettish hilt by Nandita Das) we're suddenly confronted by a column of people in exodus, complete with goat on shoulder, potli on head and the inexorable roll of bullock carts. What triggered them to move? How was this crescendo reached? It doesn't matter in Mehta's scheme of things. It's all shot in half light the oldest cliche in film history and the pathos of that seems enough.

A little later, as incongruously, Aamir Khan, playing Dil Nawaz, the jocular ice-candy wala who competes with Hasan for Shanta's favours, goes to receive a train from Gurdaspur. The Train of Death. It arrives through a cloud of smoky light, awash with bloody bodies, dismembered breasts, and Dil Nawaz's two sisters (we're later told in passing) in a sack. How does this transform Dil Nawaz? Mehta doesn't use directorial discretion to pause and capitalise on Aamir's theatrical expertise. She rushes onto another cliche. A scene of riot, arson and looting. A bloody foot trapped in a car fender.

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This is the main problem. Mehta's treatment is too simplistic; her characters too wooden, unfleshed out. As Dil Nawaz and Shanta bibi stand watching the rioting crowds, Nawaz suddenly turns to Shanta, asking her to marry him and curb his hatred. Stop the lion raging in his chest from leaping out. This is supposedly the definitive moment in the film. Shanta refuses. A scene or two later, when Dil Nawaz sees her copulating with Hasan, the trapdoor lifts; the lion is unleashed. But Mehta hasn't bothered to prime Aamir's character for the powerful transition from crude, but jolly, ice-candy man to murderous, communal battle-axe. The moment passes unnoticed; the audience, unmoved, continues to sip Coke, yo-yoing between cliches.

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While packaging the horrors-of-partition, perhaps Mehta had a different audience in mind. One can imagine a well-meaning but uninitiated audience sitting in Toronto shaking its head in sorrow. But do we want a tourist reel on Partition or one that grapples with the complex emotions that tore a social fabric? More precisely, can Mehta convince an Indian audience that still holds the living memory of that holocaust in its head? No. Because she hasn't worked out even the most rudimentary emotional parameters or textural details necessary for her film.

Firstly, she carelessly tries to pass off a feature as prominent as Delhi's Purana Qila as Lahore! Secondly, Earth makes no pretence at understanding the fractured politics or the burdens of history that underpinned Partition. It gives no sense of a larger world outside. The cruel ironies and inhuman betrayals are to be played out solely on the lives and bodies of a cast of subaltern characters. But unfortunately, they never become more than Sher Singh, the zoo-wala, Tota Ram the maali or Hasan, the maalishwala for us. There's nothing organic about their lives; so there can be nothing heart-wrenching about their tragedies. In fact, Mehta keeps them so unidimensional that even when Hasan lies hacked in a sack, and a screaming Shanta is dragged out of hiding by a mob of frenetic Muslims, we feel nothing. Idly, we wonder, is the woman's body a symbol? The passive earth upon which history was written?

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There are a few good moments; the most powerful of which is when Dil Nawaz betrays Lenny's trust and hands Shanta over to the mob. One's not prepared for it. It shocks. Other than this, the overwhelming sense Earth conveys is that of a director who keeps asking her audience: 'Is it looking good, is it looking good?' Dismal editing aside, yes, it looks good. But except for A.R. Rehman's music and Javed Akhtar's lyrics, nothing about the film moves you.

Perhaps the shoddiest cameo in the film, the most shameful concession to a Western audience is the bit about Pappu, the servant child's marriage to a grotesque, grisly man. 'She's only 10, Janu,'says Gidwani to her husband, 'child marriage shouldn't be allowed.'End of story. Mehta also throws in references to conversions and untouchability for good measure. In the process, she transforms the anguished legacy of Faiz's 'night-bitten dawn'into little more than a nautanki.

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