Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India)
dir. Ashutosh Gowariker
Fri-Thurs July 5-11 at the Varsity.

India is a passionate country. It shares this characteristic with countries like Nigeria and Brazil. Though these are big countries, passionate countries are not defined by their size. China, for example, is big but not passionate. China has its passions, for sure, but they are not extreme enough to produce a pop band that has 80 members, 30 of whom are married to the lead singer (Nigeria), or a carnival that consumes an entire city for four days (Brazil), or a four-hour-long movie with 10- to 20-minute-long music sequences that involve thousands of extras dancing on rooftops and in farm fields (India).

A country is not passionate because it builds a massive wall for its national defense, or kills millions to implement a new government policy; the extravagance of a passionate country is always expended in the area of mass entertainment. However, it's not just the size and scope of the entertainment industry that make a country passionate, but the nature of its individual works. America makes lots of movies that cost millions of dollars and require the most complex technologies to manufacture, but the films are not passionate. Spider-Man (which cost $100 million to produce), to use a recent example, is cool when compared to the passionate temperatures of Lagaan (Once Upon a Time in India), which cost $5 million.

Hollywood made Spider-Man, Bollywood (as India's film industry--the largest in the world--is unofficially called) made Lagaan. In terms of drama, there is very little difference between Hollywood and Bollywood. The dramatic figures and tensions that structure Spider-Man's plot (a love triangle, a hero from a humble background defeats a wealthy and wicked man) also structure Lagaan's. Hollywood and Bollywood tell the same stories. Where they part ways is in how they tell these stories. If Bollywood made Spider-Man, it would look more like Lagaan: four hours long, with six substantial song-and-dance sequences. This is why India is a pas- sionate country and America--despite its bloated entertainment industry--is not: Hollywood's Spider-Man would never, after saving the love of his life from a pack of rapists, break into a song and dance (from fire escape to fire escape, wall to wall, web to web).

Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, Lagaan is set in 1893 and concerns a group of peasants who are unable to pay an annual land tax (lagaan) to their British ruler because of a long drought that has devastated their crops. Through a local rajah (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), they plead to the British commander (Paul Blackthorne) for a reprieve from the tax, but the sadistic commander instead doubles their lagaan. When they return to plead for mercy from the newly imposed double lagaan, the commander offers them a wager: If they can beat him and his officers in a game of cricket, he will give them three years with no lagaan; if they lose, however, they must pay triple lagaan. The villagers don't know a thing about the "silly game," and have only three months to learn how to defeat their oppressors.

The future does not look bright for the village. But a young revolutionary named Bhuvan (Aamir Khan) sees the bet as not a great misfortune but a great opportunity. Despite the odds, he believes it's far better than their previous circumstances--paying lagaan year after year, with no respite in sight. If they win the game, they can work for their own benefit. With the assistance of the commander's beautiful sister (Rachel Shelley--a Londoner who learns how to speak Hindi within one day!), Bhuvan trains 11 villagers into a team that can beat the Empire at its own game. The climatic match against the British is nearly 90 minutes long, the average length of an American film.

There are three things I enjoyed about Lagaan. The first was the music. Composed by the great A. R. Rahman, the songs are as elegant and earthy as royal elephants. Next, the racial love triangle. The commander's sister (who is invariably called "white woman" by the villagers) falls in love with the young and handsome Bhuvan, who is also loved by a beautiful Hindi girl (Gracy Singh). Nowhere else in cinema are the sexual dynamics of Third World revolutions so clearly described: The neglected white woman (European knowledge and liberal ideals) seduces or is seduced by the potent brown militant. Lastly, the British colonial officers, who speak the "Queen's English" (or civil-servant English), are subtitled.

As one who was colonized by the proud British, I was of course delighted by the peasants' victory in the mythical cricket match. But there was one thing I liked better: The sight of proper British-English subtitled for an American audience. Nothing could have pleased me more.