Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India movie review (2002)

Enter Bhuvan (Aamir Khan), a leader among his people, who confronts Russell and finds his weak point: The captain is obsessed by cricket, and believes it's a game that can never be mastered by Indians. Bhuvan says it is much like an ancient Indian game, and that Indians could excel at it. Russell makes Bhuvan a bet: The Brits and a village team will play a cricket match. If the Indians win, there will be no lagaan for three years. If the Brits win, lagaan will be tripled. The villagers think Bhuvan is insane, since a triple tax would destroy them, but he points out that since they cannot pay the current tax, they have nothing to lose.

Bhuvan assembles and starts to coach a local team. Elizabeth Russell (Rachel Shelley), the evil captain's sister, believes her brother's deal is unfair, and secretly sneaks out to the village to provide pointers on cricket. Her closeness to Bhuvan disturbs Gauri (Gracy Singh), a local woman who has believed since childhood that she and Bhuvan are fated to marry. There's another coil of the plot with the two-faced Lakha (Yashpal Sharma), who wants Gauri for himself, and acts as a spy for Russell because he feels that if Bhuvan loses face, he'll have a better chance with her.

We meet the members of the village team, an oddly assorted group that includes a low-caste fortune-teller named Guran (Rajesh Vivek), whose crippled arm allows him to throw a wicked curve ball. There also is Deva (Pradeep Rawat), whose service in the British army has fueled his contempt for his former masters. As training proceeds in the village and the British sneer from their regimental headquarters, the action is punctuated by much music.

The British hold dances, at which single young women who have come out from home hope to find an eligible young officer. (Elizabeth, dreaming about Bhuvan, is not much interested in the candidate selected for her.) And in the village music wells up spontaneously, most memorably when storm clouds promise an end to the long drought. In keeping with Bollywood tradition, the singing voices in these sequences are always dubbed (the voice-over artists are stars in their own right), as the camera plunges into joyous choreography with dancers, singers and swirls of beautifully colored saris. Such dance sequences would be too contrived and illogical for sensible modern Hollywood, but we feel like we're getting away with something as we enjoy them.

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