/> Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Saif Ali Khan, Vidya Balan, Sharmila Tagore, Boman Irani, Jackie Shroff, Jimmy Shergil
Directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra
Rating: ** ½

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

In Eklavya lack of content isn't a problem. It's the dense tense and dark nature of the content that proves to be a dismaying impediment to enjoying the vast virility of Vidhu Chopra's storytelling.

How do we define the plot of Eklavya? Partly borrowing the dark indefinable pathos of Shakespeare's tragedy, partly reverting 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 absolutely designed to create an ethos of infinite resonances.

Eklavya is a film of many virtues. Screenwriter Abhijat Joshi and Vinod Chopra aim for that 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 tragic and bizarre tale of a dysfunctional royal family to heights of lyricism.

Some sequences such as the one where the old royal guard does his blindfolded shooting trick with an anklet for the uncouth but affable cop (Sanjay Dutt, endearingly sunshiny) or the drama's centerpiece where a critical shout-out occurs at a railway crossing with the deafening patter of camel's feet providing a bloodcurdling innuendo of morality, is so superbly designed you wonder if this tale of intangible bonds and unbearable tragedy wouldn't have been better off locked away from vision.

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.

Normal for Chopra's vision is an unattainable pinnacle. He aims for the opposite extreme. All the people who crowd the tightly-cordoned stratosphere of Eklavya are grandly wedded to destructive forces.

Unwittingly they often end up looking preposterous in their selfconscious postures of assumed dignity.

In their inability to see beyond their own hefty hunger for self-assertion the characters often end up mimicking rather than replicating the Shakespearean tragedy.

Vinod Chopra's is undoubtedly a master craftsman. At times he becomes selfindulgent in his visual panache. The sequence where Eklavya slaughters Jimmy Shergil (aiming to be lean and mean) as he watches, ahem ahem, Vinod Chopra's Parinda and the recurrent pigeons-leitmotif, 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 Mr Bachchan's expression of tender nostalgia as Vidya Balan sings the ancestral lullabye. You often see the characters framed frantically in 'show'-motion....

Wounded, scarred, mortals hurtling towards their ruination, the characters in Eklavya do not connect with us in any significant way. Reciting Shakespearean sonnets on death-beds, sobbing into the night, stabbing each other in their artistocratic backs, playing mind games that echo the traversities of titular existence, Chopra's people come alive more through their externalities rather than Chopra's stunning efforts to internalize their angst.

God knows, Chopra spares no efforts to penetrate the steely wily hearts of these bereft souls. Rajasthan is captured in tell-tale 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 the Royal Guard 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.

Eklavya is a work of art of many virtues marred by some utterly destructive forces. The performances particularly Mr Bachchan's, followed by Saif Ali Khan as the royal heir who finds out soon enough that the family guard is actually his father, lift the tale to luminous heights. Boman Irani as the ludicrously 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 manoeuvering their lives beyond the rhythms of the rationale.

There's poetry in the soul of Eklavya. But the lines do not cohere or 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 honorable failure, lifted to distinction by Mr Bachchan's stately performance.