'Spices' (NR)

For Indian women of the '40s, walking through the village streets was like passing an American construction site, running a gantlet of sexist taunts and veiled threats from sidewalk bullies. But at least the American breed deigns to lift a hammer. The political melodrama "Spices" portrays Indian men as cowardly layabouts who maintained the unjust status quo through brute force.

Ketan Mehta, the John Sayles of India, paints them as monkey kings, snoozing and jabbering on shady porches, cleaning their ears and picking at their toes. The women, meanwhile, are scrubbing clothes, fetching water in great brass urns, grinding chili peppers at the local factory or dancing for the men in the village square. "Spices" is the story of one woman's rebellion and the social change her actions inspire.

This florid tirade takes place before India won independence from British rule, when tax collectors (subedars), accompanied by soldiers, demanded more than taxes from the terrified villagers. The late Smita Patil stars as the provocative Sonbai, a young woman who spurns the advances of a mustache-twirling subedar. As played by Naseeruddin Shah, the Subedar is an unreasonable, petulant lout who recalls the cartoon cad Snidely Whiplash.

Mehta, who uses traditional conventions to strafe traditional injustices, makes no apologies for the movie's purple passion, exacerbated by Shah's mugging. If you are a student of terrible Indian cinema, the stereotypes apparently play as sarcastic. For foreign audiences, Patil's subtler performance, along with those by several other actresses, back-lights the preposterousness of the male archetypes. Among these are the subedar; the teacher, an ineffectual follower of Gandhi; the Mukhi (Suresh Oberoi), a feudal village ruler; and the Abu Mian (Om Puri), a lower-caste factory guard.

The watchman, a sort of ancient Gunga Din, is a lowly but honorable man. For that, he is the only man in this whiners' village who dares deny the Subedar. Mehta, who also abhorred the caste system in an earlier film, finds an immense dignity in the scruffy old rifleman's stand.

When Sonbai takes refuge in the chili factory, the guard refuses to open the gates to the Subedar, his soldiers, the Mukhi, the village men or even the factory's owner. The other males, a quivering flock, are ready to sacrifice Sonbai, just abandoned by her ne'er-do-well husband, to a fate worse than death.

Led by the Mukhi's wife (Deepti Naval), the pan-clanging housewives march in protest but are beaten back by their odious husbands. The Mukhi warns his wife: "Next time, I will break your leg." The factory workers, at first excited by Sonbai's stance, begin to weasel out, and ham-fisted as this all seems, the tension is undeniable. Anything might happen to the sinuous Sonbai, who clutches a sickle, whether for the Subedar or herself we don't know.

Acclaimed for her portraits of exploited women, Patil, who died in childbirth at age 31, gives an enigmatically feisty last performance. If she and the filmmaker weren't so able and the backdrop not so exotic, "Spices" would be little more than an ineffectual rant. There is a grunting ruthlessness to the drama, a vibrancy of character and moral obstinacy that compare favorably with Akiro Kurosawa's admittedly more elegant samurai movies.

"God was bored so he sprinkled the world with chili and spices," the opening song tells us. Mehta doesn't just sprinkle, he pours.

Spices is in Hindi with subtitles and is not rated