Movie Review: Eklavya - Craft Kills a Story

Remember how, Hitchcock onwards, directors wanted to appear in their films? Hitchcock, I am told, was very subtle about it (unlike, say, Subhash Ghai). When Hitchcock was in the scene, he'd be one of some ten pedestrians crossing a street - someone you could easily miss. I always thought that was one way a director "autographed" his film, like a painter does his canvas.

In Eklavya, Vidhu Vinod Chopra makes the mistake so many directors (especially the good ones) do: he autographs all over the canvas. He doesn't appear in the film, but that is perhaps the only saving grace. Every shot, every cut, every sound byte is so self-consciously crafty that you can't help feeling that the director wants to scream his finesse from the rooftop. Thus you have the plush Rajasthani mahals with the "oh so beautiful" night lights, the shots of water in pools and droplets, the clouds, storms and whatnots that punctuate the narrative so much that it starts to look like a long unending sentence. There are visually redeeming moments such as the dissolve from the queen's bindi to the moon. But the Rajasthan landscape has seen better times in Bollywood: Gulzar's Lekin, Kalpana Lajmi's Rudaali, Amol Palekar's Paheli and Nagesh Kukunoor's Dor.

What a good story VVC had! A righteous royal guard, having to father a child for the queen given her husband's impotence is, years later, faced with a dilemma: he must re-examine the morals he upholds or pay a very heavy price. This is the stuff of epics like Shakespeare or Mahabharata. Unfortunately, VVC goes Bollywood on it. Not one character evokes audience sympathy, except perhaps the wry-humored cop (Sanjay Dutt, livening things up) whose ancestors have been wronged simply because of their caste. We don't know what to make of the impotent king's character (Boman Irani, lost, at best): is he gay? Is he a comic theatrical type? A bumbling moron? A caricature of the now powerless royalty? Does every impotent man have to be a caricature? Saif is amazingly poised and emotes extremely well as the prince. AB is wasted: never allowed to introduce his real self to the audience, he looks trapped and confused, and gives his thespian best for almost nothing. Thank goodness he got the Rolls Royce.

VVC's Eklavya is no Hamlet. He never questions, doubts, or even so much as complains about his rung being down the social ladder. In the end when he is brought upon to question, you never feel his conflict, all you get is a Bollywood ending. Even caste politics, which is central to the original Eklavya story, is peripheral to this narrative. Actually this narrative itself is peripheral to how it should be shot: that, I think, sums up Eklavya for me.