Anyone who’s ever seen Seven Samurai or Dirty Dozen or Mighty Ducks knows how it’s all going to turn out, but Lagaan is so skillfully put together that you can’t help being drawn in as the Forces of Good once again prepare to do battle with the Forces of Evil.Īn extensive cast of Englishmen portray the Forces of Evil, and they all speak and act their roles convincingly in both English and Hindi. If they lose, it will be tripled.įrom this silly premise, a delightful and compelling epic has been made, one that ingeniously allows the Indian heroes to rebel against British tyranny by literally beating them at their own game. If the villagers win, the punitive land tax will be abolished. He offers them a challenge: assemble a team, master the sport, and face the soldiers in a no-holds-barred cricket match. The ranking British officer Captain Russell is enraged at the defiance of the natives and stung by their ridicule of the English national pastime. They arrive to find the foreign soldiers at rest, playing some ridiculously childish stickball game. Our stalwart protagonist Bhuvan (played by Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan) leads a delegation of his countrymen to the colonial encampment of the Raj to demand a cessation in tax until the droughts end. “Lagaan,” means land tax, and the villagers of Champaner are unable to pay their lagaan due to droughts and famine. It’s a rousing action flick packed with melodrama and intrigue and comedy, a revisionist Gunga Din with Hindi musical numbers instead of Kipling poems.
But anyone fearing standard art house fare can take heart–Lagaan isn’t some somber meditation on colonialism, nor is it your typical simplistic celebration of exotic rural life. The setting is rural India in the 19th century, where the people strain under the yoke of British oppression. The tagline for this immensely enjoyable film is “Once Upon a Time in India,” and the larger-than-life battles it presents are definitely Leone-esque even though the only weapons involved are bats and balls. I’ve been following Bollywood cinema for several years now, and I think that the recent film “Lagaan” is not only the best I’ve ever seen, but also the Indian film that’d be most accessible to a Western audience.
It was made on location in the rural village Bhuj in central India. The best blockbuster summer movie you’ll see this summer was made on a shoestring budget of a few million dollars, with absolutely no special effects.
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