Movie Review: EKLAVYA – The Royal Guard ...

By Subhash K. Jha, Indo-Asian News Service

Film:

"Eklavya: The Royal Guard"; Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Saif Ali Khan,

Vidya Balan, Sharmila Tagore, Boman Irani, Jackie Shroff, Jimmy

Shergil; Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra; Rating: ** 1/2

Can form, no matter how glorious, be a substitute for content? In

"Eklavya", lack of content isn't a problem. It's the tense and dark

nature of the content that proves to be a dismaying impediment to

enjoying the virility of Vidhu Vinod Chopra's storytelling.

How do we define the plot of "Eklavya"? It partly borrows the dark,

indefinable pathos of Shakespeare's tragedy and partly reverts to the

palatial pathos of the Mughal Empire where patricide frequently

collided with complex Oedipal equations. "Eklavya" takes us into a

territory totally unexplored and designed to create an ethos of

infinite resonances.

"Eklavya" is a film of many virtues. Screenwriter Abhijat Joshi and

Chopra aim for a sense of heightened tragedy that underlines the cinema

of Kurosawa and the music of Mozart. The quality of the sound design

(Biswajit Chatterjee), background score (Shantanu Moitra) and

cinematography (N. Natarajan Subramaniam) elevates the bizarre tale of

a dysfunctional royal family to heights of lyricism.

Some stories are better left unsaid. "Eklavya" tragically seems to

belong to that rare genre of stories that lose their relevance in their

rendering. The characters, all ruefully rooted to a decadent and dying

aristocracy, are either neurotic, manic or self-destructive.

All the people who crowd the tightly cordoned stratosphere of

"Eklavya" are grandly wedded to destructive forces. Unwittingly they

end up looking preposterous in their self-conscious postures of assumed

dignity.

In their inability to see beyond their own hefty hunger for self-

assertion, the characters often mimic, rather than replicate, the

Shakespearean tragedy.

Chopra is undoubtedly a master craftsman. At times he becomes self-

indulgent in his visual panache. In the sequence where "Eklavya"

slaughters Jimmy Shergil, the recurrent pigeons-leitmotif (seen earlier

in "Parinda") are classic Chopra embellishments best left behind in a

film that in many ways crosses the boundaries of mainstream

conventions.

Indeed, if Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara was more Ram Gopal Varma than

Shakespeare, Eklavya is more Virginia Woolf than Shakespeare.

Chopra is brilliant at capturing neurosis through the lens of the

camera. At times he makes room for tenderness. Watch Bachchan's

expression of tender nostalgia as Vidya Balan sings the ancestral

lullaby.

You often see the characters framed frantically as wounded, scarred

mortals hurtling towards their ruin - they do not connect with us in

any significant way.

Reciting Shakespearean sonnets on death-beds, sobbing into the

night, stabbing each other in their aristocratic backs, playing mind

games that echo the travesties of titular existence, Chopra's people

come alive more through their externalities rather than his efforts to

internalise their angst.

Chopra spares no efforts to penetrate the steely wily hearts of

these bereft souls. Rajasthan is captured in telltale silhouettes as

the stately royal guard Eklavya (Bachchan) forms a fertile bond with a

family of doomed aristocrats.

The narration begins as a mother-son story and builds with magical

volition into a father-son tale of clenched trauma. By the time Eklavya

points a gun at his own heir-apparent, we are left looking at a family

that doesn't need redemption. It just needs to be buried in the slinky

sand dunes of time.

The performances by Bachchan and Saif Ali Khan - the royal heir who

finds out that the family guard is actually his father - lift the tale

to luminous heights. Boman Irani, as the infertile royal patriarch,

plays his character with just that shadowy hint of mischief that puts

him a cut above the routine slime-ball.

"Eklavya" is a chronicle of defeat. People who belong to no specific

time zone seem to be manoeuvring their lives beyond the rhythms of the

rationale.

There's poetry in the soul of the movie. But the lines do not

represent any significant symbiosis of form and content. With its

unforgettable images of elemental forces, "Eklavya" is a film that was

probably as hard to make as it is to profile and define.

At the end, it remains an honourable failure, lifted to distinction

by Bachchan's stately performance.

Bollywoood.com Rating: 2

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