Mother India
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Kanhaiyalal, Nargis, Raaj Kumar, Rajendra Kumar, Sunil DuttDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Running Time: 163 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-02-25
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Eros
Movie Reviews of Mother India
Movie Review: Earth And High Heaven
Summary: 5 Stars
It's kind of like GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's sort of like THE GOOD EARTH, and even a bit like EAST OF EDEN, but really MOTHER INDIA is its own thing, one of the loci classici of so-called "Bollywood."
The young screen star Radha Mitchell (PITCH BLACK, NEVERLAND, MELINDA AND MELINDA) was named after the longsuffering heroine, Radha in this movie, as Scarlett Johanson was similarly named after the heroine of GONE WITH THE WIND. Perhaps that's why Woody Allen was attracted to them both and employed them in recent films. He was reaching back into old epic roots and didn't even know it.
Radha is a young maiden in India whose mother entangles her into a scheme whereby a local moneylender would pay for the cost of her wedding, but in the process, like Shylock, he comes to "own" the whole family and causes them pain for generations to come. The mother is not a simpleton, more like a Lillian Gish type, and besides, we get the picture that this is just how things were done back then, and that dowries and fancy weddings were everything to these people. The action switches to the birth and development of Radha's two little boys, Ramu and Birju, who grow and mature during the film, and struggle against the age-old curse of the moneylender, who nows owns everything (like the carpetbaggers in GONE WITH THE WIND).
The only thing that you've ever seen in Western cinema to compare it to fairly would be Michael Powell's GONE TO EARTH with Jennifer Jones (sometimes called THE WILD HEART). Jennifer Jones, perhaps Susan Hayward, is the only Hollywood star with emotional power enough to have conveyed, maybe, Radha's metonymic attachment to land and family. Alas she never got a chance to perform in the cinema of Bombay! It's all about melodrama, music, dance, spectacle, heart and something else, something that can't be pinned down. Recommended with a plus sign, and two such signs should you ever have had a mother or a country.
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