After a long hiatus, I am back to writing reviews. And what better to start with than the ferociously advertised Eklavya – the royal guard. The movie is a success on some fronts and a dismal failure in others. But it proves beyond doubt, that Vidhu Vinod Chopra is a true artist, not the crass populist kind like Bhansali, but a softer gentler artist who carefully composes his colors to bring the scene alive. The royal guard is Amitabh Bachchan. He is the keeper of secrets, as is quite evident from the various promotional videos which have been doing rounds on more than one channel.
His job is protect the king, played reasonably well by Boman Irani, his legacy and the numerous secrets the royal household houses. Prince Harshavardhana, played by Saif Ali Khan, although not tolerant of the claustrophobic customs and gamut of relations, feels an attachment towards the royal guard. The story is one of deceit and deception, told within, and sometimes, without the confines of the palace, with a host of interesting characters like the police officer Pannalal and the king’s rather crafty younger brother.
Throw in a mentally deficient princess, and the prince’s first love, and you have a story that if told well, should engross you. I shall not go into the details of the plot because detailing it with some kind of insight would take a lot more words than the maximum allowed by mouthshut. So what follows is just a take on the film, a few cribs, if you will.Eklavya has a great cast, and sometimes it seems as if it tends to overpower and overwhelm the story, even as a lot of the ensemble delivers quite uneven performances. Amitabh Bachchan, in stark contrast to his hamming in Black, delivers a restrained and memorable performance, intense and all-encompassing, almost justifying the Rolls-Royce which he got for this role.
What is very refreshing about Eklavya is that instead of a palace full of happy-go-lucky people who would break into song and dance and play holi at the slightest provocation, we have a palace which abounds in deceit and dementia. None of the residents lead idyllic lives, and the patriarch of the royal family is not the good fellow that Bollywood is so used to portraying. No, he has a complex mind, full of hatred, and a subdued anger, presumably because he is impotent.
The matriarch dies within minutes of the start of the movie, and instead of leaving behind the traditional mooli-ka-paratha for the beloved son, she leaves behind a letter in which she says – Your real father is the palace-guard. Thankfully, there are no nimbooda songs and none of the Bhansali opulence which would have made living through the movie difficult. Most importantly, the movie successfully pulls apart the age-old idea of the servant in the Indian feudal system being the Ramu-chacha type. Now, in the role of the servant who have a servant who does not cook and clean, but is just as human and given to desires and passions like the other members of the royal household.
Just like the murderous son, or the crafty brother, he is given to moral dilemmas, some puny, some could cause him to lose a night’s sleep. The visuals are achingly beautiful and in spite of my tendency to stop watching a film the moment the visuals overpower the story, Chopra has managed to integrate the visuals well with the story, and that’s no mean feat. The storyline is good, but could have been better, with a better handling and exposition of the dementia of the different characters. The camerawork is simply excellent, and deserves full marks, not just for the riotous colors, but also for the excellent portrayal of the eerie dark interiors of the palace, a just reflection on the stuff that human minds are made of.
This was where Eklavya was refreshingly different. But I had a few cribs about the movie as well. I could not figure out why so many shots in the movie had to be done in slow-motion, some of them made practically NO sense. Too many slow-motion sequences always make you feel like you are watching a ten minute documentary stretched to a hundred minutes. Vidya Balan was a serious disappointment in the movie; she needs to do up her screen presence a lot more and is getting extremely repetitive.
I hate it when she is doing fine, and suddenly turns all coy and whispers, and not just once, in each and every scene. Vidhu Vinod Chopra is quoted as saying in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City – “The last 10 minutes of a movie are pointless, that’s when the lights in the theater come on and the audience starts to leave”. I don’t know if VVC strictly follows this doctrine, but he has definitely lived up to it in Eklavya.
Having spent the better part of the movie doing his best, creating an atmosphere of deceit and darkness, he squanders it all in a last ten minutes of sugary, everything-is-fine madness that even Bhansali would have twiddled his thumbs. As one of my friends mentioned quite amusingly in his blog about the last ten minutes – “the only thing missing was a dhiktana song and a cricket match where the dog is the umpire”.Eklavya had the capacity of becoming a great movie, but it fell short, just because of the last ten minutes.