Love story?

I am a self-confessed fan of Ashutosh Gowariker. His Swades hit me hard in the guts like no other film has done, I have mentioned this in an earlier blog. And when a movie director pushes the envelope that hard, it becomes a real tough ask to keep it going. I present my two bits on JA with this context in mind.

Jodha Akbar is an immensely splendorous film, shot, art directed, lit and presented on a resplendent canvas, the sort of production values we usually don’t associate with Bollywood. Both Hrithik and Ash (the two not always admired for great acting skills) are more than convincing as ancient king and queen, and full marks to them for putting in wonderful performances. There are plenty of outstanding scenes in the film, my own fav is when Akbar, listening intently to the superb Khwaja song, most unexpectedly, joins the singers and sways to the music. A stunning cinematic moment, good enough on its own to watch the film.

However, the director has made one cinematic error, one that sadly weighs heavily against JA, and could cost the film its rightful berth in the category of outstanding Indian cinema. There is a rule we all learn as trainees in the advertising business, and Ashutosh would have done well to ponder on it before starting out on this high cost, blood and sweat adventure: Often, the magic lies in what you take out, and not what you put in.

The film is saddled with needless sub-plots which take away from what ought to have been a pure and simple love story, packaged with all the emotions that come with an inter-religious marriage, that too between the conservatively edgy Mughals and the passionately parochial Rajputs. I guess Ashutosh would justify the long and winded digressions as critical to providing a context to the core story, but I think he’s gone overboard on the framing, and that takes attention away from the artwork itself. The result is a patchwork of thinly connected little tales, not coming together to deliver a seamless body of work. I don’t think the length per se is an issue, which is what most critics opine. The longish length is visible ONLY because the various elements don’t synchronously gel. In the Bangalore multiplex where I watched the film, no one was in a hurry to rush home, but they clearly became restless because the pieces didn’t fit. Perhaps a brutal and dispassionate editor would have helped the director find the way out, even though it’s hard for a passionate man to lay his beloved baby in the hands of a stranger.

But I am not sure even that would have solved the problem entirely. It’s the art of telling a great story, simply yet entertainingly, which seems to have eluded the maker in this instance, something he did so magically with Swades and Lagaan. I think what started out as a love story, unconsciously turned into the life story of the emperor, which is not what we wanted or expected. And therein lies the rub. I know comparisons are odious, but I have to say Mughal-e-Azam worked BECAUSE it single-mindedly stuck to its theme of a love story and the connected father-son skirmishes, and despite the fact that the classic lacked the techical prowess of the makers of JA.

Sure, I will catch the film again when the DVD is out, to check if I missed something. But I deffy won’t watch it inside a cinema hall, it’s torturous being surrounded by weary, distracted audiences who fart out ugly Abhiash jokes and crappy Dhoom 2 dialogues during the most poignant scenes in the film. And the fimmaker must take some responsibility for this offensive side-entertainment.