certainly more sex than your average bollywood picture

but then, there is considerably more politics in the film 'earth' as well, the second movie in deepa mehta's trilogy. the story takes place in lahore on the eve of partition, framed by narration from the woman who was the little girl at the story's center, who went by the nickname of 'lenny-baby'.

the film could have easily slid into melodrama, but even the stark contrast between happy, sunny, pre-partition india and crazed, bloodthirsty post-partition isn't so heavy-handed as to appear simplified. one drawback is that if you don't have some sort of knowledge of the events going into the film, nothing is really explained. several times the love story threatens to overwhelm the historical background, but, apart from that reeeeeeaaaaaally drawn-out sex scene, it balances well.

one nice thing about indian films is that you can always count on someone you've seen before. i have to say that the transformation of dil navan from clowny flirt to murderous bastard might have worked better, though, if played by someone other than aamir khan. or maybe i can just never think of him as anything other than the daring villager from 'lagaan', a film which could well hold the dubious title of 'most exciting film ever made about cricket'. and nandita das was in 'fire', as well as what seems like too many other films for one person.

there are a number of truly unsettling moments, such as dil navan boarding the train his sisters were on, which arrived twelve hours late and filled with corpses. then there is hasan's horrid death. the worst, though, was the little boy that lenny-baby and her friend happen upon, whose entire village was murdered, his mother raped, killed, strippped, and hung up by her hair in the mosque, and on top of all of that, no one will play marbles with him and he doesn't know what cake is.

the characters, unfortunately, tend towards the one-dimensional. shanta is sweet, dil navan is goofy, hasan is the strong silent type, lenny has a leg brace, her parents are wealthy. everyone seems to have one distinct character trait and then their religion. it's hard to grasp what's going on apart from violence. but that might just be because it is far too big of a story to tell in a two hour film -- suketu mehta's excellent book 'maximum city' gets the job done with plenty of time to explain things. it's hard to even fathom the sheer size of the catastrophe, with over a million people left dead.

rohinton mistry summed it up succinctly in his novel 'a fine balance' -- "a foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth.'