Word: filming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sublime garble of ideas, the film's pleasures are unlike the pleasures of almost any other marquee picture ever produced. This is a true screwball comedy in the classic sense, in which none of the characters are "straight men," and everyone is insane in their own, inimitably comic way. Here, unlike, say, Bringing up Baby or Flirting with Disaster, the world itself is insane and unstable, as if God himself were just another kook. It's like a wrestling match with the walls erased, and the rules unknown - you'd better watch your seat, because you might be sitting inside...
Earth, the second film in director Deepa Mehta's prospective trilogy Fire, Earth and Water, tells the tragic story of the 1947 partition of India as witnessed by Lenny Sethna (Maia Sethna), an 8 year-old Parsee girl. Based on Bapsi Sidwha's novel Cracking India, Earth explores the controversial British partition of India into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, which caused inter-religious massacres by the same Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who had lived together peacefully for many years. Lahore, the city in which Lenny lives, was the site of a particularly bloody confrontation reflective of the widespread atrocities...
...film's intention for using a child's perspective manifests itself most clearly when Lenny innocently asks the "Ice Candy Man" if he saw his two sisters, who were on the train, in one of the sacks. In another scene, Lenny sees the Muslim refugees camped next door and asks her cousin who they are. Irritated that her cousin will not explain what he means by "fallen women" and "rape," she questions a young boy. The boy describes how he hid under dead bodies until the massacre of his village was complete and then went to search for his mother...
...Some critics have compared Earth unfavorably to Mehta's Fire, claiming that Earth is no more than a heavy-handed sermon and history lesson. While Fire may be a more brilliantly produced film, dismissing Earth as irrelevant would be an egregious error. A moving depiction of nationalism gone horribly wrong, Earth is richly filmed and extremely well-acted, a film worth seeing by anyone who enjoys a well-written, heart-wrenchingly beautiful story of lost innocence and passionate love destroyed by ignorance and fear. The recent confrontation between India and Pakistan involving nuclear weapons shows the continuing relevance...
...think it evokes the sheer strangeness of watching Being John Malkovich, perhaps the oddest romp of a movie I have ever seen. It is a comedy about getting inside other people's heads, and it has the kick of a head trip, which is a clich even though the film is not. This film will polarize people. There will be many people who will hate this film as much as they have ever hated anything, who will break off relationships with dates who dare to enjoy it. And there are those (the odd Harvard student among them) who will treasure...