Earth

Indian-born Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta returns to his roots (cinematically speaking) for this, the second of three theme-related, but otherwise unconnected films about India. Taking their titles from the elements, the first was Fire, the third Water. Earth is set in 1947 on the verge of India's independence from British rule and its division into India and Pakistan. The story takes place in a city caught in the middle, as erstwhile friends of various religious stripes find themselves being torn apart by the greater ethnic conflicts. It focuses on a wealthy family of ethnically neutral Parsees and is told, at least nominally, from the point of view of their young daughter (Maia Sethna). Her beautiful nanny (Nandita Das) is a Hindu but her circle of twentysomething friends includes Muslims and Sikhs, and she is the object of adoration of two Muslim men, one (Aamir Khan) initially carefree and flamboyant, but who gets caught up in the bitterness, and the other (Rahul Khanna) who is more studious and thoughtful. Adapted by Mehta from the book Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa, this is a handsomely mounted, well-intentioned drama. It's certainly provocative and disturbing in its portrait of a society torn apart by prejudice, but Mehta seems so intent on chronicling the bigger social and political upheavals that she kind of short changes the characters and the human drama, not really following through on certain ideas. Sethna's adult self (played briefly by novelist Sidhwa) opens and closes the film, implying she's the focal character, but Mehta doesn't entirely stick with the theme of the story being filtered entirely through that child's perceptions. While the romantic triangle is unevenly developed, even perfunctory, with Das one moment seeming to be with one character, then the next moment with the other. And surely that's the point of tackling real events in a fictional narrative, to put a human face on, and therefore demand viewer emotional involvement in, what otherwise might seem like distant and abstract conflicts. --D.K. Latta