Vidhu
Vinod Choora’s period drama Eklavya was released 18 years ago, and Subhash K Jha revisits the film that featured an all-star cast including Amitabh Bachchan, Sharmila Tagore, Sanjay Dutt, Saif Ali Khan, Vidya Balan, Raima Sen, Jackie Shroff, Jimmy Sheirgill and Boman Irani.
How do we define the plot of Eklavya? It partly borrows the dark, undefinable 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. Screenwriters 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 deathbeds, sobbing into the night, stabbing each other in their aristocratic backs, and playing mind games that echo the travesties of titular existence, Chopra’s people come alive more through their externalities than through 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 slimeball.
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.
