Review of Lagaan

Introduction

India’s official Oscar entry, earned a surprising Oscar nomination last year for best foreign film. Although it didn’t win it managed to put modern Hindi cinema on the map of both Hollywood and its audiences.

The film was applauded by both the critics and the public around the world, and shows the hard work of both director Ashutosh Gowariker, and actor/producer Aamir Khan. In the times of romance films being dominant in Hindi cinema, both have managed to make essentially what is a sports film set in a period time, amidst much social issues such as slavery and racism. This indeed was a financial risk for the producer and director, whose last conventional Indian film Baazi (1996) was a commercial flop.

However with its wonderful technical values from its cinematography to its editing, a great music score by west-end’s ‘Bombay Dreams’ composer A.R. Rahman, and a fine melodramatic performance from the whole of the cast both Indian and British, this near four hour epic is as good as modern Hindi film cinema currently gets.

During its long duration you’ll never feel the film is slowing down, or that some scenes are too long. Even the long one-hour climax of the cricket match is filmed in way all audiences can enjoy. It is simple and entertaining.

The film’s main distributor was Sony Entertainment Television India, who had given this film to Columbia Tri-Star to produce for the DVD. The film might have fared well on cinema, but on DVD its average quality makes overall viewing quite disappointing…

Video

The widescreen aspect ratio of the DVD is presented in a slightly cropped 2.35:1. The film was originally shot on a wider 2.45:1 ratio and cropping can be detected in a few scenes. Thankfully the picture is anamorphically enhanced, which isn’t the case on many Indian DVD’s.

Since the length of the film is quite long, Columbia have decided to put this film on two DVD-9 discs, so that the average bit rate of the picture information could increase meaning optimum picture quality. The change of the disc is cleverly done during the film’s intermission.

On a side note this film was released on a single DVD-9 disc for the region one audiences. On that disc much encoding problems could be seen, such as compression artefacts. On the other hand this is not the case for the region two disc. No encoding problems were seen while viewing.

The main problem of this disc is actually in the source material used. The film has much film debris, and grain. This makes this lavish film production diminish. It would have been an advantage had the 35mm film negative was cleaned up or if a much better source was used.

Black details are average as during some of the night scene not much detail could be seen, while some colour bleeding on the colours of the orange landscape is seen within the film.

Audio

The soundtrack on this disc captures the wonderful score provided by A.R. Rahman in an expansive manner. The music score is quite lively and elaborate on a 5.1 set-up. However this is one of the few Indian films shot with live sound so the dialogue track recording is not as good as an American film and the recoding defects (like hissing) can be heard on this centre speaker track.

Features

The extras on this film might seem quite poor to the die-hard fans of special editions, but it still manage to pleases. Firstly we have the film sixteen subtitle tracks, including English.

Then we have the eighteen minute deleted sequence that is unexplained as to why it was cut. The scene is presented in a similar quality to the main feature and makes for a good viewing has it has much humour.

The final extra was the filmography section for the main cast and crew of the film. The menus are still and are easy to navigate over.

Conclusion

While it may sound that this DVD has a lot of defects, mostly with the source used, when it is put against the DVD done by Indian film company/ DVD production house it certainly stands as one of the best treatment an Indian film has ever got on this format.