From the Rental Vault: Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India

Watching movies from India -- specifically from the major industry base for the art, the city of Mumbai formerly known as Bombay -- is in some ways like watching major Hollywood movies from sixty years ago. This "Bollywood cinema" is generally low on exposed female skin or explicit sex scenes, high on melodrama and will more than likely have at least one full-bore song-and-dance number right in the middle of the story, just like a old-fashioned musical.

And that's even if the movie is a period piece that's doubling as a sports picture, like the 2001 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign-Language Film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India.

Set during the Victorian portion of British rule over India, Lagaan focuses on the troubles faced by the villagers of Champaner when a severe dry spell strains their ability to pay taxes imposed by the British officer in charge of their district. These taxes are called "lagaan," and unfortunately the wide latitude given to British officers stationed in different areas of India to set some of their own rules allows the unpleasant and greedy Captain Andrew Russell to impose a higher tax than the villagers can pay. Villager Bhuvan tries to ask for leniency given the dry spell and poor crops, but Russell won't relent. During their visit to the headquarters, the villagers see the English soldiers playing cricket and mock the game as silly. Now angry, Russell challenges them to a cricket match -- if they win, then he will cancel the lagaan for three years. But if they lose, they will have to pay triple. Bhuvan accepts the wager but the villagers don't know about it until afterwards, and they are understandably angry with him. But stuck with the bet, they begin to learn cricket, helped by Russell's sister Elizabeth, who dislikes the way her brother treats the villagers.

Along the way, we will have a love triangle develop as Elizabeth finds herself falling for Bhuvan, who is loyal only to Gauri, a village woman. But another villager is also in love with Gauri and secretly betrays the villagers by offering to be a ringer for Russell. Eventually, after some first-class training montages, longing looks of unrequited love and three or four full-cast musical numbers, we get to to the defining moment of the cricket match, where Lagaan turns into a pure sports film, complete with the familiar figures of the unheralded outcast with secret talent, the turncoat who must decide where his true loyalties lie, the stalwart hero undaunted by the odds against him, villains who villainously cheat to win and the underdogs' determination to prevail even when down and almost out.

If you can find a movie cliché that isn't in Lagaan, you're a more careful watcher than I am. But so what? It embraces every one of them wholeheartedly, and it's well-enough written and acted to help you realize that some of those clichés show up in movies because they work. British actors Paul Blackthorne and Rachel Shelley are properly evil and heart-breaking, respectively, and dancer and Indian television actress Gracy Singh makes a dignified and appealing Gauri. As Bhuvan, Aamir Khan (who seriously earned his money by also producing the sprawling three and a half-hour, four-language movie) is at first hot-headed, irresponsible and arrogant. Only as he builds his team does he realize the danger in which he has placed his village and the responsibility he must carry, and that awareness spurs him to grow as a man and as a leader.

As the Indian film industry has developed even the country's own preferences have started to move away from the extreme melodrama and automatic musical inclusion that marks Bollywood movies. But Indian audiences, their moviemakers say, still want as much entertainment as possible crammed onto the screen before they shell out hard-earned rupees at the box office, so the format is unlikely to disappear entirely. So maybe spending two hours reading subtitles (even when the English actors speak, which is a little surreal at first) and watching a village-wide song-and-dance number before settling down for an hour-long reconstruction of a match in a sport most Americans know little about is not everyone's cup of tea. Audiences conditioned to expect and seek realism in their film fare may not be able to suspend enough disbelief to accept movie musicals with starkly drawn heroes and villains, and I struggled with it for about a half-hour before deciding to persevere and see this one through to the end. I was certainly glad I did, because whatever else you might want to say about Lagaan regarding its historical accuracy, stock storylines and characters and whatnot, you can certainly say this:

It's one heapin' helpin' of fun to watch.