The Hindu Business Line : Finding a happy medium

There's a vintage Vidhu Vinod Chopra moment in his latest, Eklavya — a bunch of pigeons take flight, and as they wheel across the screen, you know something is about to happen. The birds are a harbinger of arrival, and departure. In his unforgettable sequence in Parinda, a killing is staged, and the hero, a good man, realises that he is in the midst of bad men.

Part of the excitement in Chopra's movies is that his characters are not uni-dimensional. He revels in giving us people who feel real, who have complex motivations, and who are forced into doing unforgivable things because of circumstance. In his best movies — his first two Sazaa-e-Maut, Khamosh, as well as Parinda, the plot pulsates, and characters leap off the screen. As a counterpoint to the guys who do the evil things, he posits a `good' character, and the contrast works both as a separator as well as a bridge between the good and the bad, the moral, and the morally indefensible.

Eklayva, which he directs after a seven-year gap, shows him in mixed light. He's got a story to tell, and he has a superb cast to do the telling through, but in the end the movie doesn't add up to the sum of its gorgeous parts. And the thought rises unbidden to your mind — is the movie too designed for its own good?

Directors who like making each frame lovely, run the risk of having the look run away with the film. And the only way to not let that happen is to make sure each frame counts in taking the story forward, that something is going on with the live persons who inhabit it which makes you look at them, as well as the background. It is too often too seductive to concentrate on the look, and that's when trouble starts brewing.

Eklayva, played beautifully by Amitabh Bachchan, is the palace guard who is under oath to guard the royal members of the `rajwada' even if it means giving up his life. The death of the `rajmata' puts events into motion which end in dark secrets being unravelled, bloodshed and death. The arrival of Yashwardhan, the rajmata's son, from London, the murder of the rajmata's husband (that's the secret, Yash is the rajmata's son from another man, not her legally wedded husband), and the subsequent mayhem — all this unfolds over one hour and forty-two minutes, short by both Bollywood as well Chopra's standards.

In the end, you take away Amitabh's anguish. His clothes do not overpower him, like they do Saif Ali Khan, who is dressed by Raghuvendra Rathore, the king of `bandhgalas'. Saif, being of a raj gaharna himself, wears them to manner born, but is sadly not given enough to do. Nor is Sanjay Dutt, who plays the Dalit-boy-turned-good rustic cop with great verve: his tilted `topi', and his brash attitude towards the raja (not Eklayva, whom he treats with deference) is a crowd-pleaser. But then there is only so much you can parcel out to people if you are making a really short movie.

Lovely looking film, extremely fetching characters, not enough film. That's not the story only of `Eklayva', it is also that of some recent movies which stood out stylistically, but didn't make the cut commercially.

Take Farhan Akhtar's Don. It is by far the most stylish film to come out of Bollywood. Like the other directors who work in tandem with their scenarists, he is a fanatical about the way everything looks — even a flower-pot in a Farhan movie sits where it is made to sit; there's nothing accidental about it. So you have the new-gen Don, played by Shah Rukh Khan, resplendent in paisley shirts-with-attached ties, Luis Vuitton briefcases, Gucci (or was it Versace) shades. Even his gloves, declared the movie's pre-publicity notes, were sourced from a particular place in London.

But it's clear, taking in the end product, that all the attention lavished on the style aspects deflected attention from the substance. We admired SRK's fancy togs, and his cool villain's den; but that was about it.

A slightly older film, Rakesh Mehra's Aks was a similar victim. Mehra, an ad filmmaker, got so busy creating black and blue tones, and Amitabh's greatcoat, and lean greyhounds leaping in the mist, that he forgot to give us a movie. Last year, he added a syllable and a word to his name — becoming Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra — and got on with a story, which was about something. Rang De Basanti, one of the biggest hits of the year, was a scenarist's delight. It was also about youth and rebellion and making your life count.

Another ad filmmaker got it right in his first attempt. Pradeep Sarkar's Parineeta transports you to the Calcutta of the 1960s (it helps that parts of present-day Kolkata still look the way they did 40 years ago). The houses, the clothes (except for heroine Vidya Balan's churidars; no self-respecting Bengali girl would have worn anything other than a sari), the background were all period, and the story fresh and contemporary. The film, despite its flaws, has become a marker.

So there you have it. It is a toss-up between making your film as attractive to viewers as you can, given your constraints of location and budgeting, and going so completely overboard that the film disappears. Or finding a happy medium between both.