Mirch Masala (Smita Patil) [DVD]

Following its commercial release in New York this became Mehta's best-known
film outside India. Intended as an allegory of colonial oppression but
presented as a sex-and-violence drama, the film is set in pre-Independence
Saurashtra. The despotic tax collector Subedar (Shah), dressed in a way that
evokes British 19th C. catchpenny prints and Daumier's cartoons, imposes his
rule on a village. All the villagers try to satisfy his every whim, except for
the protesting schoolteacher (Gilani). the drama starts when the beautiful
Sonbai (Patil) is to be surrendered to the lecherous Subedar. She takes refuge
in the courtyard of a spice factory run entirely by women and is proteted by
an aged watchman (Om Puri) who closes the gates to subedar's men. Although
made in Hindi, the film draws on Gujarati verbal and performative idioms.
Mehta explicitly deployed stock literary melodrama characters, but these
cliches from contemporary popular culture lack the historical resonance
achieved by the more complex figures Mehta used in his extraordinary Bhavni
Bhavai(1980).