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Agni Varsha: The Fire And The Rain

2002, Movie, NR, 126 mins

Agni Varsha: The Fire And The Rain: Review

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The feature debut of director Arjun Sajnani, this epic entertainment — which was released in the wake of the Oscar-nominated LAGAAN — relates a portion of the classic saga The Mahabharata, by way of the stage production by noted Indian playwright Girish Karnad. The lavish spectacle was shot at Hampi, the well-preserved ruins of the monumental capital city of India's 13th-century Vijaynagar Empire, and at 126 minutes in length, it's considerably shorter than the average Indian commercial film. The story opens in a timeless ancient India, during a crippling ten-year drought. Brahmin High priest Paravasu (Jackie Shroff), who abandoned his beautiful and loving wife Vishaka (Raveena Tandon) after only a year of marriage to assume his holy duties, prepares to perform a fire sacrifice in hopes of bringing back the rains. Unfortunately, Paravasu's cousin Yavakri (Nagarjuna Prabhudeva), whose years of meditation finally resulted in Lord Indra's (Amitabh Bachchan) conferring on him eternal knowledge, chooses this moment to return, intending to unseat Paravasu. And Paravasu's naive younger brother (Milind Soman) has fallen in love with a lowly village girl (Sunali Kulkarni), whom he intends to marry in defiance of all-powerful caste distinctions. He winds up heartbroken when she's forced to marry another man, but she proves her loyalty by risking death to return to him after he's beaten within an inch of his life by palace guards, acting on his own brother's orders. Sajnani described his film as a hybrid of Indian art film and commercial traditions, and though as vividly designed and photographed as any Bollywood musical it proceeds with a certain stylized sense of ritual that may make it more appealing to American art-film audiences than the excesses of more mainstream Indian extravaganzas, which are always in danger of being perceived as pure camp. leave a comment
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