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September 23–30, 1999

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Earth

If only Deepa Mehta had as sure a way with words as she does with images, Earth might have been a fascinating depiction of India’s independence and the turmoil that followed. But while Earth is as rich a picture of prerevolutionary idyll as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Mehta can’t resist thwacking the viewer over the head with the horror of the racial violence which followed the British withdrawal. When one character discovers a train car filled with the dead bodies of Muslim men and "four sacks full of severed breasts," Mehta makes sure that Prime Minister’s Nehru’s triumphant speech is playing on the radio when he arrives to tell others the news. Though it’s supposedly told from the viewpoint of an eight year-old child — saucer-eyed Maaia Sethna — Mehta can’t resist detours into ideological discussions which would have bored any child silly. As in The Piano, a child’s naïveté is the deus ex machina which sets up the final confrontation, which is convenient but not very satisfying, and no way to end an epic with such historical aspirations.

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